Simple spread trade

[Dynamo2000]

Hi, I am new to ThinkorSwim. I am a spread trader. I have spoken to several people on the advanced trading desk and they told me that ThinkorSwim does not support the simple trade triggers I need, but it may be doable in ThinkScript. Very simply, if a stock A goes down to say $20 then you want to automatically (trigger) buy it and automatically set up a sell OCO at say 10 and 30- the first as a stop loss, the second to take profits. This can easily be done within the framework of ThinkorSwim. However I need to do this on a spread i.e. say two stocks A & B, but now I want to buy A - B (i.e. buy A and sell B simultaneously and automatically) if A - B goes down to 20 (regardless of the individual prices). Similarly I want to automatically set up a sell OCO at say 10 and 30 i.e. sell A and buy B simultaneously. The advanced trade desk said if it could be done it would only be through Thinkscript, but they did not know how or even if it could be done. Can anyone help me?

 

[rad14733]

@Dynamo2000 The support desk was correct, we cannot use a Conditional Order to simultaneously Buy one symbol and Sell another - unless they are two totally separate Conditional Orders... If they are two separate orders then they could both be triggered by the same symbols trigger criteria, say monitor symbol A for the purchase of A while monitoring symbol A to trigger the sale of symbol B... The caveat of this is that we cannot force the purchase of A before the sale of B gracefully - at least not until Schwab gets the Portfolio functions working properly... Without the Portfolio function GetAveragePrice("A") we have no way of knowing that A has been purchased before B is sold...

You are talking Stocks, not Options, correct...??? An Option Spread could function in this manner via a Conditional Order, but not Stocks... And with Options you would have to have the spread strikes pre-selected...