TD Ameritrade Think or Swim Auto Updating Excel Spreadsheet

While the Think or Swim stock platform is one of the best out there in many ways, many people would rather be able to watch their stocks using Excel. Excel is a tool they are familiar with, and with the right code in the background, can offer more data in one place than any of the stock listings available on the Think or Swim platform.

With this in mind I decided to see what I could do with RTD (Real Time Data). This is something built into excel and it allows you to query a Component Object Model (COM) Automation server to retrieve data in real time. The Think or Swim platform allows for this kind of information transfer, as long as you're logged into your think or swim software.

With a lot of digging, I was able to find how this works, find a listing of the data available, and to encapsulate it all into one sheet making it easy for anyone to put their own stock choices into cells and watch as the data gets updated. Besides the normal Open, Close, High and Low prices there are tons of other pieces of data available. Fifty two week high and low, Volume (of course), Implied volume, and my favorite Strength Meter. This last being a text based indicator of what the current trend of the stock. Uptrend, Range Bound, and others are great for those people who like to trade options, and can always use a hint to help choose whether an Iron Condor or a Bear Call Spread can be applied.

Its possible to also get data on Options and that was something I aimed to do, but time is always in short supply. Not to mention that options and option chains are a lot more complicated to display. Here is a list of the data points available in this incarnation: