Confused about the use of different timeframes

[tjlizwelicha]

I hope I am not overwhelming you all with my questions. Lol. I am trying to understand the time charts. I have read several books, and I know that each candle represents the time that you are using. For example, if you are using the 1-minute chart, each candle represents a minute, like the 30min, hour. What I don't understand is why choose the Day, Weekly, Monthly even an hour if you are trying to catch the profit in the moment? Does a Day chart represent, for example, today, Wednesday, Tues, and Monday? Those days are gone, so I am confused why it is beneficial to use. I usually use the 1 min, and 5-minute charts cause the market can fluctuate swiftly.

 

[BenTen]

You don't always have to be in the moment to make money; maybe you do if you're scalping or day trading. But for someone like me who swing trade, you need to zoom out into timeframes like Weekly, Daily, and 1HR to see the bigger picture...perspective matters. These higher timeframes are extremely useful for putting support and resistance levels on my chart.

 

[tjlizwelicha]

Do you know how to transfer my charts from my live platform to the paper money plateform? I would like to practice with the charts prior to going live. I used the shared option, but am unable to get it to open on the paper chart. It shows that it is loaded in open shared item under setup.

 

[BenTen]

@tjlizwelicha I don't think you can do that. I'm not entirely sure since I don't have a paper trading account. The best way to confirm is to get in touch with the ThinkorSwim support team and ask if you could transfer your setup over.

 

[tradebyday]

@tjlizwelicha you can share an entire flexible chart grid under one account, copy the hyperlink, switch over to the other account, once you open that under "open shared item" under "setup", it will probably open up as a separate window entirely (no big deal), you can save that grid set up under "show grid actions", "save flexible grid as".... Hope you could follow all of that, it sounded like you kind of played around with the platform already a bit so I wasn't overly descriptive

 

[rad14733]

AS @tradebyday indicated, sharing any resources is the best way to migrate... Other than that you would either have to Copy & Paste your Thinkscripts into external files, I use Google Docs, or use a second install of TOS, which I also do, and Copy & Paste between the two running instances...