How to Program Custom Trading Strategies in ThinkOrSwim
I’ve had several questions about ThinkOrSwim strategies, so I wanted to do a post on how to program custom trading strategies in ThinkOrSwim. Since I’ve been programming a lot of strategies lately myself, yesterday I decided to do a video for the official ThinkOrSwim.net YouTube channel where I go through the process of creating and testing a new, built-from-scratch strategy in ThinkOrSwim. It shows where to go to create and edit strategies, how to add and reference indicators, how to add user-customizable inputs, and then how to implement the strategy and backtest it on a specific chart.
It’s really important to quantify and monitor your trading edge, whether you’re trading discretionary setups or mechanical systems. ThinkOrSwim allows you to test strategies in mechanical form, which can later be applied to either discretionary or automated trading systems. You can take the edges you identify quantitatively with ThinkOrSwim, and apply them to a discretionary trading strategy that takes advantage of even more precise entries and exits than what an automated system might provide. And I think, one way or another, whether edges are manually identified over time through trial and error and detailed journaling, or automatically identified with systemized backtesting, quantitative edges are an essential part of all types of trading.
So with that in mind, here’s my most recent video on how to program custom trading strategies in ThinkOrSwim and run backtests on them:
