ThinkOrSwim is Still The Best Free Platform for Charting

When day trading, your platform choice can make or break your trading experience. It’s not just about the way you execute your trades. The right platform should be full of features to simplify your working process, but not so complex it’s laggy or confusing.

I’ve used ThinkOrSwim for over 10 years. It’s a bit daunting at first, seeing all the different gadgets and data on each screen. But even if you’re learning day trading for the first time, this is still one of the best options available today.

Many traders have a strong strategy, but haven’t really unlocked their full potential due to the tools they use. Depending on how complex your strategy is, some of the advice in this article may simplify your trading in a way that you did not know was possible. This will probably be the case for those of you who have little or no programming experience.

Let’s explore why ThinkOrSwim offers the best free charting for futures day traders.

Premium Charting at No Cost

The most immediate advantage of ThinkOrSwim is something that is still hard to believe at times: you’re getting professional-grade charting capabilities for free.

Many platforms charge $50-300 monthly and provide less features. For example, TradingView charges about $14 per month for the lowest tier, and that’s what you need if you just want to open two charts in the same browser tab.

Here’s the insider tip: you can open an account at Charles Schwab (which now owns TD Ameritrade/ThinkOrSwim), deposit as little as $0.01, and keep using the platform indefinitely, even if you never take a trade. That single cent buys you access to charting technology that rivals platforms costing thousands of dollars annually. As a trader focused on skill development rather than burning capital just on the tools you use to analyze your charts, this advantage is impossible to ignore.

Dozens of Features and Customization Options

While you will have no problem finding free charts online, you will struggle to find something close to the quality of ToS.

You get access to candlestick charts with customizable timeframes, shown on the left.

Dozens of built-in indicators, organized both alphabetically and by category are available under “Studies”.

A decent selection of drawing tools, easily accessible with a single click, allow you to do just about anything you need to do to add text or other symbols to your charts.

For newer traders especially, this removes a significant barrier to entry. You shouldn’t worry about losing some of your capital during the months that you may be struggling or inactive. Instead, you can dedicate your resources to your actual trades or education while still using institutional-grade charting technology.

What’s particularly striking is how ToS has maintained this free model while continuously improving its features. While other platforms lock premium features behind paywalls or tiered subscriptions, ToS gives you the complete package from day one.

Historical Data for Backtesting

If you’re serious about day trading, you will need historical data. You have to test your setups and ideas thoroughly to have any confidence in them. ThinkOrSwim handles historical data quite well, allowing you to backtest patterns and ideas across different market conditions without paying extra for data access.

The feature, called OnDemand, lets you review a specific date and time in the past in all the US equity, Futures, Forex, and Options markets. When you’re developing the skill of reading price action—which is far more valuable than any indicator or system—having this depth of historical information readily available is invaluable.

Some opt to do this through programming their strategies and running them across a period of time via NinjaTrader or other backtesting-capable software. To my knowledge, ThinkOrSwim is lacking in this regard.

But because I am a discretionary trader, and I take into account various context that cannot be accurately coded, the historical data here serves its purpose.

Sharing Your Setups Is Easy

Something else I like about ToS is the ability to share data, such as custom indicators or chart settings, with other users. Within ToS, you can send a setup to a friend through ToS-specific links, auto-generated by using the Share button.

As you can see on the right, I am able to create a link to this chart setup, with all my indicators attached to it if I want. Or, I can remove the indicators and share just the chart settings.

When mentoring individuals with ToS, I have been able to quickly reproduce the same chart settings this way, which saves us both a lot of time.

You probably don’t need to use this feature often, but it can come in handy when you’re not trying to copy paste a script one at a time over Discord or something else. This will insert the necessary custom studies/strategies for the other user to be able to load them whenever they want, and rename them as they wish.

Custom Indicators and Alerts are a Game Changer

Writing custom alerts becomes easy once you get used to the ThinkScript, and you can set it up to automatically e-mail or text you when your alerts fire.

As you get further along your journey toward trading mastery, you’ll undoubtedly realize that certain setups require a complex combination of factors to be truly reliable. Without this kind of depth, most setups become too generalized and will not work consistently.

But with ThinkScript, you can turn your ideas into code, and then into alerts, so you don’t have to do the calculations in your head while watching the charts. This is a mental burden that most discretionary traders neglect – the endless subconscious analysis and calculation we’re doing through the course of the trading session. Imagine not having to think until your alerts fire, telling you that a proper setup is about to form.

This is probably one of the biggest advantages of ThinkOrSwim, and while there are many other ways to deliver alerts, it’s a bit easier having it all in one place.

The Drawbacks of ThinkOrSwim

Now let’s look at some of the drawbacks. As no platform is perfect, I don’t consider these to be too big of a deal. I have compensated for each of these in some way, so you should be able to make do with what you have.

Historical Data Replay System is Laggy

One issue with the OnDemand feature is the lag when replaying market data. The charts take too long to load when they’re replaying data, and so it never seems to catch up to the actual pace of the price updates as they would have happened live.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have never been able to get it to work properly on my PC, and I stopped trying years ago. Instead, I simply load a specific date/time and analyze the candles, and then skip ahead 5-10 minutes when I need to.

The ability to skip forward and back 10 minutes in a single click is useful, but a custom time setting here would be a big improvement. In addition, skipping backwards seems to force a lot of data to be fetched again, causing more buffering than when skipping forwards.

One solution is to just run two instances of ThinkOrSwim. I often load the same day twice with separate ToS/windows, scan ahead for the days I want to study, and then skim through it on one chart. Then, I use the second onDemand workspace as a backup in case the first is struggling to buffer.

ThinkScript is Limited

Having the ability to create custom scripts is incredibly powerful. But ThinkScript is quite limited.

The language lacks robust debugging capabilities, forcing developers to rely primarily on manual print statements to troubleshoot issues. I make this work through the use of chart labels, and coupled with AI, it’s not too bad most of the time. But it still slows development time for complex scripts.

ThinkScript also operates within a closed ecosystem that restricts access to external data sources and libraries, limiting integration possibilities with other trading systems or APIs. The syntax is a hybrid of C++ and Pascal, and it feels dated compared to modern programming languages.

Some other apps, such as NinjaTrader, are C#-compatible so you can program complete algorithms within their software, and connect to your own MySQL database for further data storage/analysis.

Performance can be a problem on ToS if your scripts are too complex. There’s a limit to how much it will allow you to loop or process lengthy conditional statements, severely limiting the capability of a single script.

One decent workaround is to use multiple scripts, but it’s far from ideal. Still, I am often grateful to have it, as it’s simplified quite a lot of my daily trading decisions.

The Margins Are Too High

After years in the futures trading trenches, I’ve used several other platforms, and continue to use more than one when trading. For example, I often recommend TradingView, for its simplicity and the fact that it’s browser-based. It can be a great place to start when you’re new and only need one chart.

But the main reason I need multiple platforms is that the margins at Schwab are way too high.

There’s no day trading margin reductions like what you’d find at a quality futures broker. Because of this, I execute through Rithmic or Quantower while trading my funded futures accounts.

How to Start

If you’re trading futures and you’re looking to get a similar setup with multiple charts, custom studies/indicators, as well as custom alerts to simplify your trading, ThinkOrSwim is my choice. The high margin requirements make it less than ideal for trade execution, but the hybrid approach I’ve outlined allows you to leverage ToS’s analytical strengths while mitigating most of the drawbacks.

So how do you get started?

If I’m already helping you work toward mastery, chances are you already made the switch to ToS. If not, you will have to register an account at Schwab.com.

Once you’ve registered and deposited your desired amount, download and launch ToS. I recommend setting up your desired workspace, and saving it to ensure you will be able to return to it whenever you want in the future.

Put your chosen indicators/studies on a single chart, save the study set, and load it onto other charts to replicate the settings.

If you need help, feel free to reach out via Discord. Good luck and happy trading!