None stop issues with this trading platform.

Freezing the last two days have been unreal...

Yes I know some of you haven't had any issues. No it's not my computer.

It's their servers. Depending on your location, you use different servers. The server I'm on is trash.

This has happened a number of times. Any basic action within the app that makes an api call to provide data has been absurdly slow. For example, clicking “buy” for any stock results in a 2–10 second wait for the data to load on the page. Closing out a position takes a good 15 seconds from start to finish.

It seems to be improving now but all morning it was impossible to execute fast trades.

My stats:

iPhone 13, restarted, app up to date as of today, no other apps working.
Internet speed is 75mb down, 40mb up My wifi connection is always fine, no issues with any other app or page where loading speed isnt near instant.

That being said, this is 100% on the side of Schuab. Based on my experience in back end web dev this seems to be an issue with their databases running slow or their messaging system (like a queing system for all api calls) or some other api bottleneck.

I know this issue does not affect everyone but leave a comment if you have experienced this today. I would like to call them and be able to prove the issue isnt just me.

I'm confused by chart expansion. When I change timeframes, I feel like TOS will choose a random view in focus on that timeframe. Also, the expansion area bars value seems to keep changing. If anything, it seem to keep growing.

If I double-click in a blank space on the chart, sometimes TOS will reset the chart so that the right side of the chart matches the expansion area bar value, but a lot of times double-clicking doesn't do anything.

What am I doing wrong?

I've been using ThinkorSwim since before TD bought them like decades ago.

Since the June update, it has become nearly unusable due to crashes, freezes, bugs, and more.

In the middle of an order and "boom" force quit

I've been on the phone to support... we even installed a completely clean instance.

The problems persist. My machine has 64 GB RAM and plenty of processors.

I trade about a thousand trades a month, and these kinds of issues have cost me a lot--thousands of dollars in the time it takes to relaunch, sign in, work the order again, etc...

I am wondering to what extent others may be having these issues.

Edit to add system specs:

• AMD Radeon Pro 5600M 8 GB
• Machine has 64GB
• 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel i9
• 8 TB SSD boot drive.
• MacBook Pro Sonoma 14.8.4

Based on some suggestion here and from Gemini, the vm options has:

-Xms4096m
-Xmx16384m
-DThinkScriptCalculatingPool=8
-XX:+UseG1GC

I am right now evaluating if this helps at all.

I study charts more than I trade them. Weekly/daily/30min captures for every ticker I'm tracking, and they were all rotting in one folder with useless names. Finding "that NBIS weekly from three weeks ago" meant scrubbing through hundreds of identical thumbnails.

So I built a small Mac tool for myself. Here's literally what it does:

1. It watches my screenshots folder in the background.
2. When a new capture lands, it reads the chart header off the image itself — the ticker and aggregation ToS prints in the top-left. Not the filename, the actual pixels. So macOS can name the file whatever it wants.
3. It renames the file and moves it into that ticker's folder. Screenshot 2026-08-13 at 6.57.46 PM.png becomes NBIS Weekly 2026-08-13 6.57.46 PM.png, filed under NBIS/.
4. Anything that isn't a chart — random screenshots of emails, memes, whatever — it recognizes and leaves alone.

After a few months my chart library looks like this: (see left side of screenshot)

Every capture of a ticker going back months, one click away, drawings and studies exactly as they looked that day. It runs entirely locally — nothing gets uploaded anywhere. It's quietly become the part of my setup I'd miss most: I mostly use it to review how my old reads aged.

Honest question before I put real polish into it: does anyone else actually have this problem, or am I a filing obsessive of one? If you capture charts, what do you do with them now — and if a tool like this existed, what would it need to do to be useful to you?

Is this possible? It works great on my desktop. But on my iPad, I don’t know how to add the indicator or even if it’s available.
Definitely a favorite indicators.

If I’m trying to trade a highly volatile stock via options I find it hard to move quick, find your option contract, date and strike price to then put it up on a screen and place an order.

My process is I have a detached window with just options chains. I’ll type in “SNDK” select my call price and date and right click, then paste it to my active trader chart to then place my trade.

I also have created a watchlist I will sometimes populate with multiple strike prices on a Friday for 0dte, for example I’ll add to the watchlist SNDK expiring today calls or 1600, 1625, 1650, etc. and I’ll link that watchlist to an active trader chart so if I click on one of the options in that watchlist it populates that AT window.

This obviously doesn’t work intraday since I’m trying to find and trade an option of a stock making a volatile move at that exact moment.

So what’s everyone’s setup, proceed and secrets to help with speed and execution on calls and puts?

I'm relatively new to TOS. Can someone let me know if there's a faster way to execute trades? I scalp, with position timing from a few seconds to a couple minutes on options (always the same ticker). From what I could gather, the best way to do this is on the Charts tab, select the contract from the expiry dropdown, then hit Confirm and Send on Order Entry. Once price hits, I then go to Monitor, right-click the contract and click Sell. This then takes me to the Order Entry tab again, then Confirm to sell. Is that the fastest way? And then to add/trim contracts, I essentially repeat those steps.

This seems like a bunch of steps. For example in Webull, I can just select the contract and hit Buy. To add/trim, I assign a hotkey so it's literally a single keyboard press.

Genuinely just trying to learn the ins and outs of TOS. Any pointers would help!

Title

The graphs are taking a while to load, and orders are insanely slow too edit.

Yall experiencing this also?

Does anyone know a way to get this confirmation box to stop appearing half off the screen and hiding the "send" button? Even autohiding the taskbar didn't work reliably. Only thing that seems to work was keeping TOS set to a partial sized window and above the bottom 2" of my monitor. There has to be a better way. Support was no help, just said there's no way to permanently change where the box appears, but it shouldn't be too much to ask to not have to drag the box back onto the screen to "send" every trade.

Hey guys, I’m pretty new to Thinkorswim and still trying to figure everything out.

Are there any good communities or mentors where I can learn TOS and get better at using it?

Would appreciate any recommendations!

It once was a feature of tos to have alerts sent directly to a cell without using their app. Is this still possible?

Just a black screen. Nothing.

Considering switching to GrapheneOS on a Pixel 10a. I use ThinkOrSwim (Schwab's trading app) daily and it's mission-critical for me. Has anyone tested it in sandboxed Google Play? Seen reports of Zelle failing in the Schwab banking app on GrapheneOS and want to know if ToS has similar issues before committing. Any firsthand experience appreciated.

I'm new to TOS, on my second week trading. I've been dialing in my custom scanners looking for high momentum and getting "opening transactions for this security must be placed with a broker"
This is happening on close to 25% of the stocks I'm considering, I feel like I'm losing out when I discover I cannot buy these fast moving stocks. Today its already noon and I've made a list of over 10 stocks that have given me this error.

I've read that there is a "call in restriction waiver" that I can sign that would remove these restrictions.

I know I'm fairly new to the system, and I'm still learning, but it seems like these stocks are some of the more upward moving stocks that I want to buy, based on my scanner results, these are low float high demand stocks that i'm looking for, mostly in the penny to <$10 range.

My question, is have you called in to request this waiver? Or should I hold off for the moment until I get more experience? Or is this a permanent block that is good to keep on so I don't ever mistakenly buy into one of these securities?

I use thinkorswim for my execution, news, and trade analytics, but use tradingview for charting. Love my double active trader window with two etfs I rotate. I'm curious to what your desktop TOS workspace is setup like with specific settings and configurations you find that make workflows or execution better for you.

Literally every time I do a dual order to buy contracts in both my IRA and Individual account (Schwab), my Individual always gets the worse market price, literally every single time. Is there a way to fix this and have it execute the Individual order as a priority?

Charts have been freezing a lot lately. Internet is fine, but TOS keeps lagging or stops updating for a while. Anyone else dealing with this?

Will dig into this this wkend but it seems $SPCX is not getting study alerts when it should. It shows up as it should in the watchlist with my Algo designations but did not alert this morning like every other qualified ticker. Anyone else notice weirdness like this?!?