thinkorswim Reviews 46

I see most reviews are folks unhappy about being forced to switch to TOS. I does have a higher learning curve, but so much more powerful. That being said, it could be better. Particularly the user interface and trading tools.
For instance, I have asked for a while to get them to separate working orders from stop orders. Having all my stop orders clogging up the interface is maddening. It forces me to toggle my working orders on and off so I can see my open positions. It has cost me opportunities and cost them fees from trades I would have made. Stupid.
My other complaint is the wide spread between interest they pay on cash vs what they charge for margin. Has me considering moving brokers.

The platform itself is pretty good. Placing trades is not so good. There is very little that's intuitive about the platform overall, but it has more features than I know what to do with. I love the fact that one can program one's own indicators, or tweak indicators to try new ways to use them - most of the time someone else has done it on usethinkscript.com or the like - and I've recently started asking chatgpt to program some indicators and scans and also some back-test-able strategies, and sometimes it works. There are limitations to the thinkscript language, and there are definitely limitations to chatgpt, but... it's interesting.

I'm amazed at the negative reviews here - Streetsmart Edge was a good platform for charting - not great, but good, and actually placing the orders was FAR superior. If all you did on the platform was use the basic indicators (macd, rsi, bollinger bands, etc) and place orders - it was great. But it's gone. This is the new.

TOS has way more capability, even if it is a bit less intuitive. Its competition isn't Streetsmart edge - its competition is tradingview, tradestation, sierra, ninjatrader, etc. TOS is free - which, to my mind, makes it better than so many others - especially for someone who is trying to learn trading without incurring too much expense.

Compared to StreetSmart Edge, the 'new' ThinkOrSwim platform is a step backwards for the active traders. As a Schwab customer for 30+ years, the transition experience has been horrific. Yes, the tech support team does an admirable job in attempting to explain the 'new' platform, even though they are limited to 45 minutes phone time per session. The ToS platform is not intuitive, not robust, challenging to configure, devoid of common sense features and cumbersome to navigate. Hours and hours of configuration set-up time have not resulted in anything useful. Commission free trading? - who cares?...we need a useful platform !!
-Steve

After Charles Schwab bought it, TOS is the worst platform to trade, slow, full of errors, lagging, with gaps, etc. the worst so far, if anyone can recommend a good platform please let me know

This is probably one of the worst platforms on the market. Very difficult to use and most importantly totally confusing while placing trades. Limited flexibility in what a user would want to make life easier. Totally crowded screen that can't be tailored to remove most useless features. If you trade futures, perhaps useful. Options and stocks horrible. Did I say horrible? Worst than horrible. Pay Schwab to make brilliant techie acquisitions and shove them up to you as the most advance platforms ever. Shame!

Schwab had a great trading platform in Street Smart. After being forced to TOS, I discovered I really don't like it. Its quirky at best. I wonder if the developers are are traders. The logic looks backwards to me for a stop limit order. I've seen other quirks that don't come to mind now, but I have noticed.

After finally finding a few Youtube videos which explained basic setups (without hours on analysis and drawings to sit through), I am less upset with TOS. Though, I am still rather upset with Schwab for making me have to learn another trading platform from scratch and with their less than helpful transition videos. My setup with SSE (Street Smart Edge) is not attainable with TOS however it comes close now. The more I get used to it, the less I swear at it. Maybe I'll learn to love it....like Old Gregg.

I can't say enough good things about thinkorswim. Their platform is powerful, and their customer service is outstanding.

The Schwab Transition has caused the thinkorswim platform to behave more horribly than usual.
fills have become consistently bad, orders only fill 50% of the time and it appears that the best price guarantee is no more.
Customer Support is incentivized to avoid culpability or responsibility for platform shortcomings. They manipulate wording and obfuscate specific points to distract you from pinpointing the problem. They never want to see recorded evidence that shows the issues described, they use the same " Everything looks fine from our end" talking point regardless of how obvious the issue is. My last communication closed the chat for lack of activity after they themselves didn't respond for over 20 minutes. Customer service has become incredibly disrespectful and disingenuous, of course that's probably due to all the complaints they receive daily from unhappy clients.
Thinkorswim has always had little issues here and there, most users knew what to expect on a daily basis but the Schwab transition has completely changed how orders are executed. the platform was hardly capable of handling its existing clients and with the influx of millions more, it's just awful.
It appears the payment for order flow has become even more of a priority for Schwab than it was for Ameritrade, the terrible executions and fills are a testament to this. Thinkorswim has officially become one of the slowest executing platforms available. After several tests side by side with competing platforms, It's abundantly clear that thinkorswim is the slowest.
When comparing recordings from now with recordings from a year ago, the difference is staggering.

Agree with previous comment - tos is TERRIBLE - terrible beyond belief. Schwab had the best trading platform on the planet (StreetSmartedge) and then gave it up for the most unbelievably useless product for the common user - impossible to use - and being very nice: thinkorswim sucks beyond belief.
Schwab SSedge customer being FORCED to tos.

Not user friendly at all a terrible experience

Ever since the schwab its been terrible not reliable
crashes on trades locked me out on the phone app. Today is saturday I have no access to charts to do research. very very frustrating. TD trade was awesome
99 percent uptime. :(

It was a cool plateform until schwabb took over and turned it into a piece of #$%. Stunned!

TOS is has MAJOR error in "Position Statement" under "Activities and Positions" under "Monitor" tab: Believe it or not, TOS CANNOT even accurately calculate the cumulative unrealized gain or loss of a single equity position established by two opening BUY orders across a three-day period. Just spent 45-mins with one of the TOS tech staffers documenting this incredible defect! Says they'll get right on it... Are you kidding? This piece of junk shouldn't even be allowed to accept new users, let alone be propped up by Schwab.

This the Black Box from HELL!!!
Too many unnecessary bells and whistles..
I have developed my own successful trading style and strategy. Not ready to experiment just need to continue trading on a platform NOT a major change
It is too hard to navigate and trade.
Good luck in the future ..

TD Ameritrade trading platform is moving to Think or Swim platform. Long time investors have no say on the matter. TorS is to complicated for most users of TD Ameritrade users. Spend most time searching, and losing time. If you go to another website to look something up while you are on TorS it logs you off when you come back you loose you place and have to start over. Not a good system.

Total garbage since Schwab took over. Accounts get flagged, shows in view only. Totally sucks. Spent 2 hours with customers support and they can't fix. Stay away

woke up one morning and went to log in on the computer desktop app...my saved login info no longer worked. I used the option to text me a code to change my login and password. I never got the text. Then I log in to Schwab, again using the already saved login info and it says this account doesn't exist. Just like that, my account is completely wiped out.
I call them and the lady on the phone used my personal info and sees I had two accounts and they've been closed and one of them has zero money in it and the other has 15 cents. WHAT THE. She could see I made a trade the Friday before (this was the following Monday). she said she's never seen this and gave me another number to call...isn't that what they always do? Whatever happened they better recover my actual account value and send to my bank. **update, Schwab is who I talked to not TOS but they told me that my account was closed by TOS for "business reasons" and thats all they could tell me. Schwab said they sent a check to me via mail for my account value and thats all I needed to know. TOS is very clunky to use anyways and messy charting compared to Webull which I've used since I started trading and still use them.

They forced retail traders to close account and still charged money even when we comply. It's an unbelievably disgusting practice. Please save yourself from this terrible and greedy platform/company.

So many times the stock price goes under my buy target for options and does not execute…. And I end up missing out. It’s frustrating. Happened again today with META.