How I Use The tastyworks Platform

tastyworks Platform

In this article, I want to show you how I personally use the tastyworks platform to place trades.

This will not be one of these hour-long tutorials. I just want to show you the basics of what you need to know to place your first trades.

5 Things Your Broker Needs to Know

Let’s briefly recap. In order to place a trade, there are five things that your broker needs to know to get you into a trade:

1. First, your broker needs to know what you want to trade. The symbol and whether you are trading a stock or an option.
2. Second, you need to tell your broker whether you want to buy or sell.
3. Third, your broker needs to know how many stocks or options you want to trade.
4. The fourth thing is at what price do you want to buy or sell.
5. Finally, the broker needs to know the duration of the trade. It is either a day order, or a “Good Till Canceled” (GTC) order.

How To Place A Trade On tastyworks

Let’s start with the basics here so that you know exactly how to place a trade.

When you open tastyworks, this is what it looks like:

If you would like to have more information on tastyworks, go to Rockwelltrading.com/tastyworks.

As you can see, there is a watch list on the left hand side, and honestly, I’m not using this at all. I just click and drag it off the screen this way we have a little bit more room here for the main screen.

So looking at the five things that you need, the first question is where do you buy or sell? Where do you place the symbol?

And it is up here in the upper left hand corner.

So let’s say you want to buy Tesla, you’d type in TSLA. Just below that, you’ll see the “Positions” tab.

The “Positions” tab is where you see all your open positions.

At the time of this post, you can see that I was in TGTX and MUR. You can see how much is the open P&L and how much is the P&L for the day.

Now, let’s move one tab lower to the “Trade” tab and as you probably guessed, yes, this is where we place the trades.

tastyworks is mainly for options trading, but you can also trade stocks and futures. In order to trade stocks, it’s fairly easy.

First you’ll want to click on the down arrow in the dialogue box at the top above the option chain.

In this drop-down you will see where it says either “LONG” or when you click on “LONG,” it changes it to “SHORT” stock. Then you click on Go.

This is when you see the little order entry window at the bottom.

Now after we place the symbol, we need to say, do we want to buy or sell at the quantity.

So at the bottom left, you see will see “BUY” and “SELL” buttons. You will use these to place either a buy or sell order.

To the right of this, you can see where you can change the quantity. You can either do it with the arrows, or you can override it and type in how many you want to buy or sell.

You can also specify a limit price, and say whether you want to place a market order, limit order, stop market, or stop-limit order.

If you’re unfamiliar with the orders, I did a video for you. This video shows you how, and when, to use a stop order versus when to use a limit order.

Next to the “Order Type” section to the right, is the “TIF” section, or the Time In Force.

The Time In Force is the duration, whether you use a day order or good to cancel order.

In this section you will have a day order and good till cancel order.

There are a few other options like “Ext” order which means extended hours. Don’t worry about these, just worry about the first two.

When you click “REVIEW & SEND,” you can review your order so that you see your stock buying power and your option order before you send it.

How to place an options trade on tastyworks platform

Now I want to show you how to place an options trade.

If you’re trading options, then you know there’s a little bit more to it than just picking the right symbol.

For options traders you need to know the expiration, by when shall the option expire, and you have to specify whether you trade a call or a put option, and the strike price.

Now I will show you how to do this on tastyworks.

Again, we’re keeping it super easy. This is not meant to be an extensive tutorial. I’m showing you the basics so that you can enter an order with confidence.

So here you see all the different expirations for Tesla. And you see you have the July 24th expiration, four days to expiration, and July 31st, eleven days to expiration.

You can also see that there are different colors. The dark blue ones are weekly options, the lighter blue ones are monthly options.

So let’s say we want to buy a call for Tesla. We expect Tesla to skyrocket and we’re going to buy one for $1,800.

So you see on the left-hand side there are calls, on the right-hand side there are puts.

So if you want to buy a call we just click on the “ask.”

Now you see that order entry window opens again. This little window here makes it super easy to tell the broker how many options you want to trade.

Because again, you need to tell your broker if you want to buy or sell this option, how many options do you want to trade, and at what price.

You can enter all of this information in this order entry window.

This is where you also specify whether you want to use a limit order or a market order.

When trading stocks or options, I nearly always recommend using a limit order, and again, I have a video on this.

Then you just click “REVIEW & SEND” and it will tell you how much of the stock buying power or option buying power you need.

As you can see, it is super easy.

Apple Example

At the time that the video this article is based off of, Apple was trading at $392. Let’s say we’re bullish on Apple and we expect Apple to go above $420.

We want to buy an option with a strike price of $420 right here.

You see it highlighted, and it costs us $6.10.

As you can see, super easy to change the quantity. All you have to do is click the arrows to increase or decrease the quantity here.

Now you see B1, which means “buying one.” As you change the quantity, it will change from B1, to B2, etc.

To change this to a sell order, you can just click “B1” and this would change to selling instead of buying. So as you can see, it’s super easy.

Then you click on review and send and this is how you would then send the order and put it in the marketplace.

Viewing strike prices & changing expiration dates on tastyworks platform

Now, here is something cool that I really like about tastyworks.

When you’re entering an order it makes it super easy, especially when you’re an options trader.

Let’s say you want to see a different strike price.

So here you can just drag the mouse and click on another strike price instead of manually typing it in.

You can change the quantity here and you can even go out in expiration or come back in expiration.

When you click on the “+TIME” button, the order moves to August 28th right there, instead of August 21st.

When you click on “- TIME” it comes back to August 21st. I think this is actually a super cool little trick.

You have the possibility to trade more complex options strategies but honestly, if you just want to buy or sell options this is how easy it is to do it.

Again, if you would like to have more information on tastyworks go to Rockwelltrading.com/tastyworks.

Activity tab on tastyworks

But I also want to show you a few other cool things here.

Next I want to show you the “ACTIVITY” tab.

The “ACTIVITY” tab is where you see what’s going on.

As you can see, I have two working orders. I want to buy an option on CALX for $1.60 and right now it is trading at $2.35. So I want to see that it is coming back.

And here I want to place an order. I want to buy a call at $2.40, right now it is trading at $3. So this is where you see your working orders.

tastyworks Toggle Switches

Now you also have toggle switches. So that’s something that I found, based on my experience, is unique to tastyworks.

So if you want to see all of your filled orders, you just click on Filled. Here you’ll see both your working orders and all of your filled orders.

I’m an active trader, so there’s a lot of fills that I’m having here in these accounts.

You can also see the canceled orders, and as you click them, this how you toggle them on and off. If you only want to see the canceled orders, you click again on filled and working, this toggles it off and now you see only the canceled ones.

For me personally, I like to see my working orders here and sometimes I want to see on what did I get filled.

You can narrow it down to today, so you can see what orders you got filled on. So as you can see, super, super easy.

Bells and Whistles

These are really the basics. I want to show you some bells and whistles now because I think that there’s some cool stuff with the platform.

My goal with this tutorial is to show you how to place a trade on tastyworks, whether it is a stock or options trade in 10 minutes or less.

Here are some other cool features.

Charting Platform

Now, one of the other cool things is that with tastyworks you do have a charting platform.

When you click on “chart” a chart will come up. In this case AAPL because that is the last stock ticker I searched for.

There are some cool tools here. You can click on an hourly chart, or you can have a 15-minute chart of Apple if you want to.

All of these are live, they are real-time. So when you’re opening an account with tastyworks, they give you free real-time data. I think this is pretty cool.

Plot Indicators

You can also plot indicators if you wanted to.

For example, if you like the idea of plotting Bollinger bands, you can just add Bollinger bands and modify the settings.

You have a pretty neat charting platform here as well. This is just one of the bells and whistles.

And as you can see, there are some other tools where you can, for example, draw trend lines.

Now, I personally like to use TradingView as my charting platform, so I really don’t want to go into all the details of the charts feature.

It’s pretty intuitive, so you can definitely figure it out here. No problem at all.

The real power of tastyworks is when you are trading options

Even though you can trade stocks here, the real power of tastyworks is when you are trading options.

Because one of the things that you can do is do an analysis.

For example, if you’re buying this particular option of Apple, you see here, first of all, at a glance, what is your probability of profit?

This is 19%. So it’s pretty low because we’re trading an out of the money call option.

And you see, as you’re moving it closer into the money, your probability of profit moves higher.

You also see how much extrinsic value it has, as well as the probability of making at least 50% on the option.

So here in this case that it moves up from $7.50 to roughly $11. This would be a 50% profit. So this is what you see here with the P50.

You see the Delta, Theta, maximum loss, maximum profit that you achieve, and the buying power.

Everything is at a glance here where you can quickly compare what makes more sense because you can see what the probability of profit is.

This is just the summary.

Now some of you options traders love to have a curve.

So this is where we think, “Ok, how much money would we make or lose with this option at different stock prices?” And this is when it expires.

Powerful analysis tools

So you have powerful analysis tools. This, again, is just a very brief introductory article that shows you the main functions here.

It’s actually pretty cool because you can show the theoretical zones here.

The P&L theoretical, for what happens if the stock moves to a certain price over the next few days.

So as you can see, there’s some cool analysis stuff here.

Besides just having the most important information that you need when trading options, you can really geek out and dive deep here and have a graphical and visual analysis.

Now, this is pretty cool, especially if you’re trading more complex options strategies.

So let’s say you want to trade a debit spread, and you’re buying this call and at the same time, you’re selling a 4.10.

So this way, you go back to the curve and you see, OK, how does it change when you’re trading these two options as a spread?

And you see how you can even change the strike price.

I really like this. I think it’s super intuitive that you can see “what if?” by being able to see the probability of a profit.

The probability of making at least 50% on this trade, and seeing the Delta and the Theta which are the max profit and the max loss.

How to configure columns

Let me show you one last thing. This is how to configure the columns.

This is something that I was a little bit surprised with, in the beginning, and took some getting used to.

When you’re trading options, you see the bid and the ask.

You always see this, and you also have two more columns that you configure any way you want. And here are all the possibilities.

So if you’re an options trader and you would like to know what the Delta of an option is, you can display the Delta here by clicking on any column, and selecting “Delta” from the drop-down menu.

Then it will show for both the calls and the puts.

If you want to display the Theta of all the options, then you can change it the same way.

Now, at first, I thought, well, I would like to display more columns and it is not possible.

It is fixed, you can only display four columns, and out of these four columns, two are fixed. So it’s something to get used to.

So, for example, if you want to see the open interest, you have to replace the Theta column with open interest.

I personally like to see where has the option traded for the day, where is the high and the low of the option.

I usually don’t like to buy at the high, and I don’t like to sell at the low here.

But again, you can configure it however you want. Having only two customizable columns is something I had to get used to.

So as promised, this is just a very quick introductory on how to use tastyworks. If you have any questions, leave a comment below.

If you liked it and you think that others could benefit from this article, remember to share it.

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