The ThinkorSwim Playbook
What real traders say about the indicators that actually work
Ask a trading forum which indicator is best and you get fifty answers, half of them from someone with a subscription to sell. This book took the opposite route: it read the places ThinkorSwim users actually talk to each other, pulled out the claims that kept recurring, and checked the important ones against their sources.
Buy on AmazonWho it is for
- You have ThinkorSwim open and too many studies on the chart.
- You want to know which indicators experienced users keep, not which ones sell courses.
- You would rather read one filtered account than forty forum threads.
What it covers
- The day-trading core the communities converge on — VWAP, the 9/21 EMA structure, opening-range and prior-day levels, relative volume, market internals — with the ThinkorSwim setup steps for each.
- A scanner-first swing workflow, so the platform does the looking instead of you.
- The claims that did not survive checking, disclosed rather than repeated.
What our own research measured
This book is about which studies earn their screen space. That is an empirical question, and it happens to be one this site has measured. Below is what some of the best-known signals actually did across 12,050,609 occurrences on 7,993 US stocks between 1994 and 2026, measured against the S&P 500 over the following 21 trading days. None of this is in the book — it is our own research, and it is free.
| Formation | Occurrences | Before 2018 | Since 2018 | All years | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overbought: RSI above 70 | 2,595,192 | -0.09% | -1.26% | -0.39% | Lagged the market, both eras |
| Golden cross | 47,325 | -0.08% | -1.19% | -0.60% | Noise — no reliable edge |
| New 52-week high | 877,324 | -0.15% | -0.73% | -0.30% | Faded after 2018 |
| Breakout on volume | 228,020 | +0.10% | -2.59% | -0.66% | Noise — no reliable edge |
| Pullback in an uptrend | 1,087,083 | +0.39% | -0.43% | +0.18% | Led the market, both eras |
Read from our Formations study, which is rebuilt every morning. "Before 2018" and "Since 2018" are two independent halves of the sample: a formation only counts as reliable if it did the same thing in both. Averages are tilts across hundreds of thousands of events and say nothing about any single trade.
See the whole study, and get the free ThinkScript that plots it →
Get the book
The ThinkorSwim Playbook is on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
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