My Interactive Brokers Day Trading Setup | Step-by-Step for 2021

hey everybody welcome back to taking trades so this is the long-awaited video that everybody's been asking for and i'm finally getting it out i apologize for the delays but this is the interactive brokers trading platform setup video where i'm going to show you how i set everything up how i set the presets how i get the defaults how i get everything going so that when you get up in the morning if you want to trade by just literally clicking one maybe two buttons you can get that all set up so it takes the stress out of your morning trading routine if you're trading a pretty simple trading setup so let's dive into this so this is my ibkr account ibkr pro and i just want to start things off by telling you that i pay 25 a month for nasdaq quotes live nasdaq quotes and then i pay commissions and i pay i trade size of about 1400 shares when i'm scalping in the morning and i pay round trip total about 15 in commissions and that's it so i'm really happy with the platform it's lightning quick it moves really fast it hasn't allowed price action to jump over my stop loss like think or swim did even in a very quick you know market opens quick trigger immediate stop out it handles it all beautifully and it price improves me on occasion and that that's just wonderful so i just want to start off the video by saying it's an amazing platform i highly recommend it i don't work for them and i don't get any kickbacks it's just my honest opinion so to dive into things this is my paper account i didn't want to mess with my live account so i log into my paper account and i'm basically going to show you the setup from scratch just like i did for my other account so let's first start off by talking about the actual platform what you see in front of you now my setup is incredibly simple and it's so simple it's almost boring i just need to be able to see the last few 15-minute candles and i just need to be able to see sort of the summary and the order sort of that live trade area once my trade is finished so i just have two panels up and i'm going to show you the first steps which would be you go up to this lock and click that that puts a big green screen or a big green border around your account that tells you that you are now in edit mode for the panels within the platform here's what i mean by that if i click this x we'll say don't show that again it disappears so right now i just have this chart in here if i wanted to i could drag this thing and make one big chart or i could drag it all the way to the side make it really tiny but you can see i have this big workspace over here so you're saying how do i get that order entry window over there well i come over to new window i click that and then basically what i go do is just go to orders click orders and it'll pop this little guy right here you can move it around you can do whatever you want with it i choose to bring it up in the corner like this and then i just drag it all the way down okay and that's basically all i do with it and then once it's set where you want it you'll come into this plus button and you can pick some additional information i like to have the trade summary as well so i have orders i have trades and i have summary so i have that all set up right here so that's all good now you'll be able to toggle through these and see everything that that's happened with your trades for that day so i'm going to put it back on orders so it's all set now then i come over to this chart and how do i get this chart here all i do is go to new window go to chart click that and you can see it throws up another chart for me i can put this chart wherever i want i could have two three four ten charts you can do whatever you want but you would ultimately want to like say i wanted to have two charts right here i could then bring this in and for a second let me just move this over i could take this chart and just squeeze it in here drop it all the way down and have two charts like this if i want or i could tuck this back up and then what i could do with it is i could put another one down here so i could have four charts there's also an option for thumbnail charts which are tiny little guys that just kind of give you basically just a reference of you know your watch list stocks are they moving up or down or just basically at a glance information but these are the regular live charts and so once you have your chart on here you can just drag these to exactly where you want them and for me you know right about like that is pretty good i'm gonna see if i can tighten this up a little bit the top looks like that's as far as it goes okay so that's my trading setup it's just two panels it's just the activity panel and then it's just the chart panel and once those are in place and you don't want to mess with them anymore you just come back up to your lock here and you click it and now it's locked now you'll see i can't drag i can toggle between the two but i can't grab and move anything i can't shrink anything i can't do anything that's all set up now once that's set up the one thing i want to move into really quickly is to just explain a little bit of the functionality on these charts because it can take a little little time to get used to it's not intuitive all the time but what i like to do is it gives you these little these little i guess you could say adjustment buttons and there's one down here people ask how i center my chart and in terms of top to bottom centering what i do is i click this little button and i'll toggle a few times and that'll just shrink your candles and if you want them back up you just click the other way so that's sort of that y-axis or up and down vertical scrolling or vertical tightening of the chart the other one that took me a long time to figure out and i'm a little embarrassed that it did is people ask how i get this space right here because usually your candles come tucked right up against the edge how do you put space there if you come down here to the volume area right below it you'll see this little arrow right here if you hover that you'll see a little hand now with that hand you can click and slide and it moves it so when when you guys see your chart set up when you click and get a new a new chart to come in it's going to be set up like this and for a lot of people they're like i just don't like that it's right against the edge of the border there on the y-axis so all you do is come down grab that little arrow wait till it turns to a hand icon and then drag it to wherever you want and drop it and then it'll just stay there then you can come over and you can tweak these all you want so that's kind of the layout and then if you want to get into more specifics about the candles the candle colors other things that you'd like to put up here on your toolbar you can come into this file area and then edit and you can go into your chart parameters and you can mess with the parameters of this specific chart this video i'm not going to get into how to change the colors that's pretty self-explanatory within the edit chart parameters area you can you can get into all kinds of stuff in there but it's and then the view is going to give you different areas to check out to have different features on the chart so with that being said that's the simple layout layout that's all i have on my charts and then the next thing i like to get into is to talk about how to set things up so that you can just click a button and have the trade work so what i want to show you first and foremost is the file button up here drop down click that when you drop down you want to go to global configurations you can do it here or you can do it here once you click global configurations you need to think about global configurations as whatever you set up here is sort of the the overarching umbrella it's what's going to override and basically take over your platform it's going to give all the data to trickle down to everything else it'll feed everything else so what i like to do is i like to come over and i go to presets and if you click on presets you can then walk over here to stocks because that's what i trade i have it set up for stocks you can do it for options or futures or whatever you want but i select stocks right here and then what you want to do is you want to come in here and i actually it makes it a lot clearer if i close these up it'd be nice if they came close because it's very clear so right here this is your preset area for global configurations for the platform basically anything you set in the presets in here is going to override everything presets will even override hotkeys now i don't have a lot of hotkey stuff set up i just have my presets and then i have some a button set up and i'm going to get into the button here in a bit but right now you're going to go in you're going to say okay what size am i trading now for me this is just my setup i have a set size every month that i increase so this month i'm trading a size of 1400 shares so i'll open this up i'll toggle that open and basically what i'm going to do in here is i'm going to type in 1400 shares now if you were doing something else they have different like different contracts and stuff i'm just dealing with stock so this is just 400 shares and that's all you have to change now if you want to they do have a default for size increment like if you wanted to be able to toggle up or down to kind of add or subtract shares on a different screen you can do that i think this came set up standard as a hundred shares but i just put 1400 in and that's the only thing you have to mess with then you're going to click apply and that should be set then you'll close that up and then let's come down to primary order now primary order is going to be your risk management opportunity this is where you decide how do i want to enter the trade do i want to enter on a market order a limit order a stop limit order you have all these different options for me i've selected the stop limit order and the only reason i've selected that is because i like to get in when the stock breaks down below a certain level so i don't want my order triggered early i only want it triggered once a certain price gets hit so i have stop limit set up and then once this is set once you pick from here stop limit the only thing that's active down here is stop limit price these two you don't have to do anything with because they're not active unless you selected them from this drop down it'd be nice if ibkr maybe grade these out like if you select stop limit then it should gray out limit and stop you know like make it a little easier more intuitive but for stop limit price this is saying what where do you want to get triggered and i set the stop right here i said wherever i put my stop you can say bid ask the last price you can sort of of add different parameters to it but i like to just say stop it's wherever i place the order on the chart and i'll show you that here in just a bit so my stop is at wherever i put it and then the limit on the stop limit is a plus 10 cents so this means i get triggered at say let's say for simplicity on a long trade i get triggered at eighty five dollars and i'm willing to accept a price up to eighty five dollars and ten cents that ten cent gap it's so that you don't get skipped when markets are moving really quickly so i put in a 10 cent amount here and that's all you have to do in here so that's set up stop limit stop means where i'm going to where i'm going to click on the chart that's where i want the stop to be and then i want to add 10 cents to it so that's done click apply close that one up now the target order because i like to use a bracket i like to have a stop and a target on every trade that i place so for my target i'm going to open that up we're going to come in here and you're going to see i want to auto attach an order that is a limit okay limit meaning by not accepting anything below it i'm accepting anything at or above it so the limit order will get triggered when it gets hit and the limit order is based off of the parent order so limit price i want it to be the parent order plus 75 cents now this could sound confusing but what this means is let's say you get triggered into a trade and you have you get triggered at eighty dollars and you want to take profit at 80.75 well if it's hard coded in like that 75 cents from where you placed your stop your stop limit order what if you got some slippage so instead of getting in at eighty dollars let's say you got into 8005 your stop limit your stop your your limit target is still at 75. so now it's only 70 cents so you can see how that's kind of a pain so you want your target to be calculated off wherever you get filled and the parent order is going to be your fill price so if you get filled at 8005 then 75 cents above that would be 80 80. it'll auto adjust it for you i had somebody ask me the other day in the comments on the youtube channel how how do you get your target to self-correct itself when you get slippage this is exactly how in the presets parent order plus whatever amount you want and then i click apply offset to parent okay and that's all you have to do in here click apply close it up attached stop order so here's probably the most important part you want to you want to select i select an adjustable stop because um actually you can select adjustable stop in here um yes i i just put adjustable stop there's another video we can get into about moving stops but we'll just keep this one simple i put adjustable stop and then the stop price is again the parent order wherever i got filled minus 30 cents apply offset to parent checked so i want a 30 cent stop from wherever i get filled not at where i place the stop order because i might get slippage i want a true 30 cents from wherever i get filled and this does exactly that once that's in place you don't have to worry about anything else this part down here this is all different stuff so there's your stop loss click apply close that up and you're all set say okay and now all those presets are set okay so from here you might be saying jimmy well there's no like order entry how do there's no where do i click to enter shares or submit an order and now we'll get to that that falls under these buttons down here okay so we're going to go back up here we're going to click file we're going to do global configuration and then in here instead of going into the presets we now want to come over and we want to come to charts and we want to go to the the chart trader and you're going to have buttons now these buttons are attached to that chart that you had every time you put a chart on your screen you're going to have the option of opening up that buttons panel okay and i'll show you that here in just a second but right here you're going to see a sell stop is going to sell at the chart trader price now what you can do is you can you can come in here and create a new button so you could come in here and maybe instead of the alert you can edit buttons too but you can create new buttons with the background color foreground color and you can basically set up all you want all i did was use this cell stop button here and i clicked edit so the cell stop button you can now come in and you can you can change the text if you want however you want to mess with it you can create it and maybe sell like a like a stop limit sell button you could type in here whatever you want to do but it's a it's a cell action and inside of this configuration here let me move this over just a little bit you basically i guess i'll cover myself up for a second here but you can basically come in and look at all this stuff what you have is size default default is what you set up in your presets so that's the beautiful thing it's a default order type default again you set that up already stop limit it's already set stop loss take profit it's all set up stop price default stop low price default everything is default and already set up so you literally don't have to worry about any of this stuff because it's already set up so from here you can just cancel out i just wanted to show you where you can make changes if you want to create a new button you can do that if you want to move the order of the buttons you can do that if you want to change the function of a button you can do that as well here so those are in the buttons so now what we'll do is we'll close all that up and we'll cancel so now to open up these buttons down here you can see i can toggle these open and closed but if you come up here to file and edit and you go to chart parameters you can open this thing up and basically what you want to do is you want to come down to additional data and features this little toggle right there and what you want to look for is this buttons panel button right here okay if you turn that on and then you say okay and this is being funny here so if you say you want to turn that button panel on then you're going to click apply and you're going to say ok and that's going to have your buttons all right here now if you turn that off let me show you how that works let's go to chart parameters let's go on here and let's say buttons panel off and i click sorry about that and i click apply then if i say okay you can see my buttons are gone right now i can't use them so we want the buttons to be there the hot buttons so i'm gonna click button panel on and then we'll click apply and okay and now they are there so what i do in the mornings i watch my chart and i'm waiting for the market to open and when i'm ready to place my short order now again i only trade short so you would want to have a buy button as well which you have one here you can get that all set up as well but i would click sell stop i click once and once i click that button now you see this red line that's here that red line corresponds to where i'm going to place my order my short my my stop limit order to get short so let's say i want to get short at 81 i put that red line right on 81 and i click now you notice what just happened it put my bracket on the screen for me so that i can see it i can say okay that looks really nice i see i've got a 30 cent stop i have a 75 take profit i think i'm ready to go and the last thing to do you're going to click the t that means transmit click transmit it'll give you this confirmation box it'll say okay 1400 shares it'll tell you where your cell your stop limit order is it'll tell you where your profit taker is and where your stop loss is when you're ready you just click transmit and now that order is live and that's all there is to it so in the morning when i put this on just like this i now put it on mark it opens and i just wait and i wait to see if i'm going to get triggered and then if for some reason you decide i don't like this i messed it up i want out you can either click this button cancel or you can click cancel all okay so i'm going to click cancel all order and it's all gone okay and it'll show it to you here for a moment but you can check trades in summary and you'll see that no orders were active and then if you say okay now i want to get in i can click my button click here click transmit confirm it ready to go now you just wait and that's all there is to it now i'll cancel it up here you can cancel right here all right so you're out and that's all there is to it to my platform it's two panels with the preset set up and the buttons activated i only use the sell button and i place the stop and the take profit at the same time and then i just let things play out so i hope this video was helpful i know this has been a long time coming if you got value out of this hit that like button and if you're new to the channel please subscribe we'd love to have you stick around and if you haven't seen our private facebook group that is free there is a link in the banner of the youtube channel as well as the description come over and check us out and a bunch i think we're almost 300 people now trading sharing ideas fantastic group of people come join us hope this video was helpful drop me a comment below and we'll see you next time

2021-03-12 19:14

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