Using thinkorswim® to Find Long-Term Holdings

Long-term investors may view thinkorswim^®, Schwab's customizable trading platform, as simply a place to actively trade stocks and other securities. But what you may not realize is that it also has a wealth of features you can use to investigate buy-and-hold opportunities. Here's how to do so using one of thinkorswim's most popular features: the Stock Hacker.

1. Located under Scan, Stock Hacker is like a beefed-up version of the Stock Screener on Schwab.com. 
2. To begin, select the universe of stocks you'd like to scan (a.k.a. search). You can pick from dozens of market segments, including all U.S. stocks, popular market indexes, and specific industries. Here, we've chosen to Scan in the S&P 500^® Index, found under "Public (R-W)."
3. You can further refine your search by intersecting (a.k.a. including) or excluding specific market segments. Here, we've opted to Intersect with the Consumer Staples industry and left Exclude blank.
4. Once you've defined your search universe you can begin adding filters to the "conditional groups":
   • All of the following will generate a list of stocks that exhibit all of the selected characteristics.
   • None of the following will generate a list of stocks that exhibit none of the selected characteristics.
   • Any of the following will generate a list of stocks that exhibit one or more of the selected characteristics.
5. Within each conditional group, + Add filter gives you five filter categories: Stock, Option, Fundamental, Study, and Pattern. For long-term investors, the Fundamental category is likely the most relevant. (Learn more about the benefits of fundamental analysis as part of your stock research.)
6. There are more than 30 Fundamental filters to choose from, including cash flow per share, long-term debt to capital, and revenue. Here, we've added three Fundamental filters to All of the following and left the other two conditional groups empty.
7. Once you're happy with your filters, click Scan to see a list of companies that fit your search criteria.
8. If the resulting list of companies in your Search Results is too long, you can further refine your scan by adjusting your search parameters for each filter—either by changing the numeric values or by dragging the shaded blue area. Hit Scan again to refresh your Search Results.
9. When you're happy with your search, you can Save as watchlist so you'll be able to monitor stocks that fit those same criteria whenever you log in. You can also choose Alert when scan results change to be notified when a stock no longer fits your criteria.

Bear in mind that investing in stocks can be volatile and involves risk, including loss of principal.