How to Set Price Alerts on ThinkorSwim

How to Create an Alert in TOS Video Guide

Hello Traders! In this video, we’ll be going through how to set price alerts in ThinkorSwim. You might want to use a price alert to let you know when a stock has reached or fallen to a specific price. For example, let’s say you want to buy a stock when it drops to $210. Instead of setting a GTC buy order, you might want to set a price alert so you get pinged when the stock reaches that price, allowing you to look at the chart and make sure the setup is still valid.

The first step will be to right-click on your chart, and navigate down to where it says “Create alert.”

It will populate the alert window for you, giving you a couple of different options with setting the alert. 

You can change the symbol and spread, and adjust the price settings to get more specific with what you want to happen before you get alerted. 

Depending on where your cursor is on the chart when you right-click to create the alert, that will be the price that populates in the price window shown below. Feel free to change that price to whatever you would like to be alerted for! 

If you scroll down a bit more in the alert window, you have some more options to personalize your experience with the alert.

You are able to adjust the sound, as well as the kind of push notifications you’ll be getting for the alert. 

You do have the option to upload custom sounds! 

P.S. Text notifications are nice, but oftentimes they could be delayed depending on the time of day and volume of information that ThinkorSwim servers are experiencing at that time. 

If you continue scrolling you have more settings to sort through under the “Options” dropdown. 

TG provides a great example of how to set an alert on $GDX. 

Once you have all of your criteria set for your alert, the last step is to click “Create” and you’re good to go!

If you want to look at all the alerts you have currently active, navigate your way over to the “MarketWatch” tab at the top left of your screen. 

This will provide you with information on all the alerts you have set! 

That concludes our tutorial on how to set price alerts in ThinkorSwim! If you want to learn how to read trade alerts in Thinkorswim, click here.