Worden TC2000 Charts, Layouts, and Workspaces Guide

In this Worden TC2000 foundations series lesson we are going to be covering all things charts, layouts, and workspaces. We’re going to explain exactly what each of those elements are, and we’re going to show you how they all interact with one another. It’s important that we understand how charts layouts and workspaces work in order to get the most out of the TC2000 software.

This lesson was intended as a video walkthrough guide so it is highly recommended you follow along by watching the video below so you can see visually where everything is in the platform. We did include the transcript below if you want to quickly search on any terms but it will be hard to follow along without the visual component. Please enjoy!

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Video timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:24 Customizing, creating, and savings charts in TC2000
• 7:11 Customizing and saving layouts in TC200
• 11:13 Symbol and timeframe linking charts and watchlists
• 14:06 Exploring TC2000 workspaces
• 16:50 Tip #1 – Optimizing workspaces for performance
• 17:48 Tip #2 – Workspace history and restoring prior layouts
• 18:43 Miscellaneous tips and final suggestions

Video transcript

Hello. My name is Evan Medeiros from thetraderisk.com. I will be your tour guide throughout this Worden TC2000 Foundation Series. I’ve been trading since 2009, and I’ve been a Worden customer for nearly as long. My background is Computer Science and I’ve spent a lot of time writing custom scans, indicators, watch list columns for myself, and as a service to thousands of traders, just like you. Once you get done with this video, you want to check out the other guides we have on our channel, and on our website, you’ll find plenty more TC2000 resources, including free downloads available for you as well. And now let’s get onto today’s lesson.

In today’s video, we’re going to be discussing charts, layouts, and workspaces. We’re going to demonstrate how to customize each of these. We’re going to explain exactly what they are, and we’re going to show you how they all interact with one another. It’s important that we understand how charts layouts and workspaces work, because it is what is going to enable you to get the most out of TC2000 so you can understand how to make and show and display the information that you want in an efficient way.

Let’s dive right in. We’re going to start with charts. Charts are the most specific element out of the three, and we’re going to start our journey here. So if you look at my screen, I’ve got TC2000 open. I’m looking at version 20 and I’ve got a chart of the S&P-500 open. Notice it’s a candlestick chart and I have two indicators on this chart.

The upper indicator here, I’ve got a MACD, 8 and 21 period. On the bottom end of this chart, I have volume with a 21 bar moving average on the volume. So this is my chart. If I look at the top left in this tab right here, you can see that I’ve actually given this chart a name, it’s called My Evans standard. So this is my standard chart that I like to use when I’m just generally, doing some technical analysis, when I just want to throw up a stock or an ETF. This is the view that I prefer to have: MACD, volume, simple candlesticks – very basic and very straight to the point.

But sometimes, I’m going to want to see a different view. I either want different indicators, or I want to see maybe a line chart or an open high, low, close bar chart. Because of that, I would like to have the option to create different chart types. So let me show you a couple of small examples first. If I go to the next tab here, you can see, I have another chart type called Evans Bollinger, and as its name implies, the difference here is that I now have Bollinger bands applied to my chart.

And so just by a click of the tab up here, I can toggle back and forth between these different chart types that can have different indicators. If I go to my third tab, I have a chart type defined as the 50 and 200 SMA. So this is where I have two simple moving averages plotted on my chart, and they are the 50 and the 200 day when I’m interested in seeing where prices relative to those moving averages. The key distinction here is that these are all individually saved chart types.

So let’s go back to the standard tab here, the standard chart, and let’s just put an RSI indicator on here, and let’s also look at something like changing the plot. If I click on Edit and I go to the Plot Style, let’s say, I want to go to a high, low, close setting here and I want to change it to white and red as up bars for white, down bars as red.

So maybe this is my new view, and I don’t really care about volume on this view. I just want to see momentum down here, and maybe I want to display the RSI as a histogram. So this is something that looks entirely different now, and notice it’s still under My Evans Standard, and this is not a standard chart anymore. This is something very different. So what I would want to do is now save this chart as a new chart type. In order to do that, I would just right click on the chart, I would go down to Save and I would go to Chart As, Save Chart As, and now I’m going to give it a name.

Maybe this is now My Evans RSI, open, high, low close chart. And I would click save. I’m not going to save it because I’m not interested in this. This is just an example, but that’s how I would go ahead and create a new chart type. I’m going to click cancel. And then I’m going to go to this little plus sign here to put a new tab, and I’m going to click on this chart. And I can see all of these different views here.

You can click edit chart properties, and you can change all of these other things, similar to what we just did. Plot style, you can change colors, you can adjust the scaling and you can change grid lines. All of these options are specific to the chart. I’m not going to go through all of the different options. They’re mostly self-explanatory. If you have a question, leave it in the comments. The key distinction here is that you would be right clicking and you would be saving the chart as something that you’re specifically interested in.

Worden TC2000 layouts

Now, let’s move on to layouts. Everything we’ve looked at so far has just been a full screen chart. But we can add other things to our screen, to our primary layout. And I’m going to show you how to do that. Let’s start with something very simple. Let’s say we want to add a watch list to keep an eye on during the day as we’re trading. So I’m going to click on the Watch lists button up here, and I’m just going to click on Canadian ETF. So now we have this watch list that has appeared in our screen here.

And let’s say we want to add this watch list to the side of our chart. And so we’re going to click on this little Move Window button here. And we’re going to click on the first option, which is Move. Now we’re presented with a bunch of arrows and we can also add it as a tab, which is what I was showing you earlier, when we were tabbing through the different chart types. But we also have these right, bottom, left, top arrows. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to just click to position item to the right of here. And what we now get is a screen that is divided two thirds with A chart one third the watch list, and we can adjust it. We can move this as we see fit. And what we’re basically doing now is modifying a layout. A layout, which includes a watch list and a chart.

And it’s actually not just one chart, it’s actually a tabbed five charts. So that’s what this layout looks like and if I were to save this layout it would include, a watch list with four different tabbed charts. Now let me show you how to save a layout. So on the bottom tabs here are where the layouts exist. So you can see this is currently called single standard. That’s just my default name for a single standard chart. But if I were to right click on that tab, and then I click Save Layout As, I would now give this a new name.

I could call this Canada ETFs plus, charts, or whatever I want to label it, click save. And now I can always recall this screen, this layout with my watch lists positioned as I want it to, on the right with the charts on the left side. I’m going to click cancel because I don’t want to save that. And I want to show you some other options here. So I’m going to click on File and I’m going to click on Open Layout.

On the left-hand side, these are all layouts that I’ve already built myself or have worked on. But on the right hand side, you can see all these prebuilt layouts. So you can see all of these different ways you can construct your chart and you can see other starter layouts down here. So let’s just for instance, go to this top right one that’s four timeframes. Let’s click this. And suddenly now, TC2000 has this prebuilt layout for us, which is a four chart, different timeframe, multi-timeframe view with the left side now being a watch list.

I can actually go through here and I can change the chart, change the symbol on this watch list and all of the charts get updated. And so there’s a couple of things to talk about on this particular view on this layout. So the first is, all of these charts are linked up. That’s one thing to take notice of and the way they are linked up, are through this little symbol link.

If you take a look up here at the symbol link, you’ll notice it’s on a blue symbol link. And then if you look at the chart over here, it’s also a blue symbol link. And in fact, they all are. And that’s why they’re moving together, is because they’re all linked on a blue symbol. Now, when I change it, all of them update to synchronize with one another. If I actually want to say, you know what, I don’t want this specific chart to sync up.

I want to change this to, not linked or I could change it to another color, but notice now when I click, that’s the only one that’s not moving and that’s because I just unlinked it. And the reason I might want to do this is let’s just say, I want this to be the S&P 500. I just want to keep this chart on the S&P 500.

I want everything else to move, because I want to compare, what Adobe is doing versus the S&P 500, or what ADM is doing, or whatever symbol I’m clicking on in this watch list versus the S&P 500. So this is a way now to synchronize symbols, but we can also synchronize timeframes. And so let me show you quickly how we can do that. If you notice the T, time frame link in here, this little T symbol, you can see that currently we don’t have them linked up, but we can.

I want to change now, the timeframe link to red, and I want to change the timeframe link to red up here on this other chart. Now, if I change this timeframe, notice only the top two charts are moving. That’s because I’ve synced up their timeframe to whatever I am looking at here, and because I clicked on daily, they both moved to daily. If I change these bottom charts to a green timeframe link, you can see that they will start to synchronize with one another.

This starts to get even more complex, when you get into scanning and you start scanning for stocks. You can actually have the scan linked up on the timeframe and the symbol as well. We’re going to have a separate video on scanning. So I’m not going to get into any of the specifics there, but essentially, all you need to know is on this layout, you can synchronize timeframes and symbols.

Worden TC2000 Workspaces

So once again, this was our four timeframe layout. If we click on File and open the factory default workspace,  we’re going to finalize here with workspaces and then just different layout types. So when I open up this factory default workspace, this is something you might be familiar with when you first became a TC2000 subscriber, this was what you were probably presented with when you first booted up the software.

This is a workspace that has all kinds of different layouts and subsequently all different types of charts and chart types. So what you’ll notice here is this layout now is again, totally different. We’ve got a chart in the top right. We’ve got a watch list on the left. And now on the bottom, we’ve got some trading windows here.

If we had a brokerage open with TC2000 and we were placing orders, our positions would show up here, our trades would show up here, and our order types would show up here. If we were paper trading, they would all show up at the bottom. This is just another layout type that we can build, that we can construct. If I go to this tab down here, you can see here’s our TC Classic. So again, you’ve got notes and news down here, you’ve got a watch list on the left and you’ve got charts on the right.

You can see all of these different layouts that we are essentially paging through, and this one has two different chart types, on this main window here. So the key distinction is that chart types are the most specific and that’s our core chart, grid, indicators, etc. Layouts have all of these other elements, everything outside of the chart window is now in a layout. And we can save layouts by right clicking on the bottom tabs.

If we click on this new layout tab, we can open up other layouts built within this overall singular workspace. A workspace is everything open here. It is all of these different layouts and different chart types. It is the biggest encompassing view of TC2000. If you’ve been a TC2000 user for a while, the old terminology here were layout groups, so you’d have layouts and layout groups, It seems like they’ve done away with layout groups and they’re just calling them workspaces now. And so workspaces, is again, everything that you see here in all of the tabs at the bottom, which have multiple layouts.

Optimizing TC2000

Couple of things to keep in mind here. So number one, workspaces potentially get to be a very bloated heavy load on your system. If you’ve got, say, for instance, even this, what we’re looking at here, the factory default layout, which has all of these different layouts running, and they have all different chart types, multiple different watch lists, etc. If you’re keeping this open during the day, this is pulling in lots of data and consuming resources.

I would suggest creating a slimmed down workspace when you’re trading, just to keep resources low, so you don’t have a lot of latency and your system isn’t slowing down. And then maybe after hours, you have a different research workspace, which has all of the heavy, in-depth analysis that you like to do.

Another tip is that in the file column up here in the top left. If you click file and you go to workspace history, TC2000 is really good at saving the layouts, and your history throughout the session. So basically if you ever make a mistake, if you delete something, if you delete a chart, or if something disappears, or you break a layout, or a watch list, oftentimes you can come into the workspace history and just restore an older version.

So you can actually just scroll down here and restore an older version, and that might bail you out in case you make a mistake. As soon as you restore a version that’s good, make sure you save it again, that way you have it restored from any of your mistakes.

Concluding charts, layouts, and workspaces

We didn’t get to cover all of the details because we’d be here for a very long video. There are a lot more chart settings and chart properties that we didn’t talk about. There’s also lots of different ways to move elements. We talked briefly about this little Move button here, but there are more ways to swap windows, you can put chart types in little small squares, you can float them in new windows. So I didn’t get to talk about that. If you’re interested in a specific video on just like arranging elements, leave a comment below.

We touched a little bit on the different views here, and a lot of those layouts are pre-built. So I would just definitely take a look at some of the starter layouts and the prebuilt layouts that they give you in TC2000. Also, options, we didn’t talk about options, but you can certainly have an options watch list on here as well and arrange option chains.

Hopefully you found this video helpful, and I always like to ask and just remind everyone here, for those of you who are more experienced, if I missed anything important on these topics, or if you have more information you’d like to share, tips or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

I want everyone to learn from everyone, and even though I’ve used the software for a decade,  I’m constantly learning new tips and tricks. Finally, don’t forget, we have a lot more TC2000 guides on our channel, as well as resources and downloads on our website.

Have a great day and good luck trading!