Worden TC2000 Drawing Boards — How to Use, Move, & Organize Boards
In this Worden TC2000 foundations series lesson we’re going deep on drawing boards. We’ll discuss all of the options you have available to organize, move, and display up to 8 different drawing boards across your platform.
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!
Not yet a Worden TC2000 subscriber? Use this referral link to claim any available discounts.
Video timestamps
- 0:00 Introduction
- 1:28 Where to find your 8 drawing boards
- 3:35 Why use different drawing boards
- 5:50 Display, move, and count drawing boards
- 9:39 Opening watchlists of drawing boards
- 11:12 Understanding the scratch SCR board
- 12:20 Only greater than 5% chart display option
- 14:24 Tips for organizing drawing boards: time-frame, alerts, etc.
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 talking about drawing boards in TC2000. This is a lesson that might seem pretty simple from a high level. You might understand the different boards and how to draw on charts, but there’s actually a lot of functionality underneath the hood in TC2000 that I don’t think many people are aware of.
I want to go through all of the options you have accessible to you. And then I want to give you some tips at the end on how you might want to organize the different drawing boards and just some different things that I’ve found helpful. So hopefully this is going to be something where you learn a few new things and tricks with TC2000.
Let’s dive right in. The first thing you’re going to want to do is open up a chart and we’re going to click on the little paint brush, palette brush up here, and we’re going to expand our options. There’s something right off the bat. There’s this little more button that you saw me just click on. So first off you’re going to click on this on the right, to open up your drawing tools and then the more button down here is actually what’s going to give you even more options and data about your drawing boards.
If your screen doesn’t look like this, if you’re not seeing all of these different boards, the eight different boards we have available to us, then that means you don’t have the setting checked off in your platform. In order to get this view to even show up, you’re going to need to go up to the top left, all the way in the top left of your screen, you’re going to see this tools menu, all the way up here.
You’re going to click on tools and you’re going to go all the way to the very bottom, system settings selection. And you’re going to click on system settings, and you’re going to go to the charts tab, second tab in. And the second option here is include extra drawing boards. I think by default, it’s been so long since I’ve had a new account with TC2000.
I believe when you first get started, this is unchecked and you need to manually go in here and check this, so that’s something you’re going to need to do. As soon as you do that, you should get this view over here with the different boards. There are eight boards that you have accessible to you for each chart.
You also have this scratch board that we’re going to talk about a little bit later, which sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn’t, it’s kind of a weird thing. We’ll talk about that in just a little bit. But that’s how you’re going to get these boards accessible to you. And then again this little paint brush up here, and then click on the more button down here to get even more functionality for you.
Let’s jump into some of the different use cases for drawings. And then we’re going to talk about what all these numbers mean over here and some of the functionality we have available to us. I’m going to click on this less over here, and I’m going to go down to just this view. Right now you can see if I look at the right-hand side here, you can see we’re looking at the scratch board right now.
We’re going to click on the number one board and you can see when I click on number one, we suddenly have these trend lines that just appeared. First thing you’ll notice is again, if you look at this number one, you’ll see that in the top right, you can see that little orange dot there that basically indicates that there are drawings on board number one. There’s nothing here on any of the other boards.
If I click on these other boards, notice this chart is empty. The only drawing right now is number one. I’ve put on these two trend lines over here, just to do some simple TA on this Boeing chart and nd maybe I want to have a different style or a different timeframe.
I’m going to go over some tips later in this video on how you may want to use these boards, but maybe I want to have something a little bit different on board number two, I don’t want to see those trend lines. Let’s say I want to just sort of highlight where price action is right now, because I might be sharing this chart on social media. And I just want to highlight this and I want to take a little bit of a broader view here.
I want to look at, I don’t know maybe this little sideways range, right? Now I have this different view where I’m kind of magnifying on this range that Boeing has been in, and I got the little circle on there. Notice, chart number one still the same here. It is still just my trend lines.
Number two, I’ve got these shapes drawn on my chart, so this quickly starts to show you how you can separate your technical analysis or your viewpoints on the same stock. You can see why this is valuable because you may want to have these different views at different times depending on what your focus is at that current time.
What we’re going to do now is click on this more button again, and we’re going to show you what some of these numbers mean. The first thing that you’ll notice is we have all of the boards listed out here and you can see this middle column. We got the ticker symbol BA, which is our current active symbol.
And then you can see that we have the number three on the first board, and so we can actually do a couple of things with this. First we can click on board number one and what that’s going to do is show number one’s drawings, even though we’re on board number two right now.
We know we’re on board number two, because this little light check mark here on the two spot is where we’re currently looking at. But if I click on one, it’s suddenly going to activate one. So this is a way first to see multiple views.
You know what we’re going to do is we’re actually going to click on less. We’re going to go to board number three and we’re going to put this channel drawing on board number three and on board number four, let’s use this big old pitchfork that I don’t really know how to use, but we’re just going to stick the pitchfork here.
Suddenly now we’ve got a Pitchfork on four, we’ve got this channel drawn on three, we’ve got the shapes and then we’ve got the trend lines. So let’s go back to the more and click on some of these other boards and you can see now we’re starting to get our multiple boards showing up all at once. So we can see this whole nightmare of drawings on this one single chart all at once.
That’s one thing to take notice of is the multiple boards being displayed at once. The second column here is an actual indication of the number of drawings you have on that board. And so you can click on this number and you can actually move to a different board.
Display, move, and count drawing boards
Let’s say for instance, I want to move this trend line to number four, or let’s go number five, cause nothing’s on number five, so I can move this to number five and suddenly my number one board is clean. It’s back to zero and if I were to click on the number five, there is my trend lines. So this is an easy way and this sounds simple with the dummy sort of examples I’m looking at here.
But if you’ve been using this platform for a while and you’ve been annotating charts for months and years, you may have 20, 30, 40, or 50 different trend lines and notes and highlights on a particular stock. If you need to move 30 or 40 different annotations, it would be a nightmare to do it individually by hand, but you have these shortcuts where you can actually just, move them to a new board.
Let’s actually delete the drawings or maybe I just want to move them to another board, get them out of the way. I can start with a clean slate. So that’s a first little helpful trick there, is that you can move drawings. And what you’ll actually notice is this third column here is actually showing you how many symbols are active on board number one. So you can see this is 1,216.
That’s how many different stocks that I have drawings on in TC2000. And then the actual number of drawings I have is 3,634. That’s all for just board one. That just goes to show you a overview of how many different annotations you have on board number one throughout the entire platform. I don’t actually ever really use it or care about it necessarily, but it does give you at least some insights as to what boards you’re using the most activity on.
A reason that is more interesting is if you suddenly want to start looking at the stocks that you’ve annotated, and you can do that by clicking on this column and you can click on open watch list. This is going to load for me is all of the stocks that I have drawings on, on board number one.
I’ve got some annotations down here, clearly a trade I took way back in 2015. I can see this one where I don’t know where my annotations are, but I’m sure it is somewhere so on and so forth. So it’s kind of a neat little feature here to be able to open a watch list with all of the stocks that you’re annotating on a particular board. That’s kind of clever and I don’t see many other platforms able to do this.
Moving drawings, deleting drawings which again, you can do by clicking on the button and you can delete the two drawings. And it’s going to ask you, do you want to delete these drawings on board one for WST and you can click delete drawings or cancel.
Now I want to go back to my Boeing example here. Remember I cleared out board number one, I moved all those drawings to board number five, and you can see those trend lines over there.
Now I want to talk about two other things. This scratch board that is specific to this symbol, but also this chart template, and if you don’t know what a chart template is, we just did a foundation series video on this a couple of weeks ago.
You can click on that and I’ll try and put a link in the description or just check this playlist on YouTube. You should see one on chart templates. But what this was supposed to be is a board where if I put this trend line on here, this would only show up for Boeing and only show up in this case Evans standard chart.
Notice I have a scratch board on, and even though I just annotated Boeing with this trend line, it’s not showing up even though I’m on the scratch board on this other chart template because I changed chart templates to a Bollinger Bands chart template. Notice though, that if I click on template five, I can get to my trend lines. I can get to everything I just made on a different chart template, but I can’t get to the scratch board, which is tied to this chart template.
The second thing that is kind of hit or miss for me also is all this down here. This little check box you see here that says only greater than 5%. So what does that mean? This is designed to only show you drawings that take up more than 5% of your screen.
The idea being, if you are working on some small, small space on a chart, and then you suddenly, I don’t know, zoom out to a multi-year view, you don’t necessarily need to see all of the little details that are becoming extremely small on your screen. I would assume that this is a tiny trend line here.
When I zoom out this far, I’m surprised this is still showing and I’ve played around with this. It’s great in theory and maybe this is more for intraday use, which I don’t do a whole lot of intraday trading, or annotating on really small timeframes, but in theory, you’re not supposed to see drawings they’ll get hidden from you if they are a very small part of your screen.
That’s one that seems a little hit or miss, or just temporarily doesn’t work at times. Maybe it’s my user error, but as to my knowledge that’s what it’s designed for, so that’s something you could play around with, and again leave a comment below, if you’ve got more insights there.
At the very, very bottom here you can see erase all, it’s a dangerous button, but if you want to just clear all of the Boeing drawings here on the selected boards and delete everything again, you could do that.
That’s at a high level all of the different functionality we have available to us, open the watch list, move drawings, see how many drawings are on boards, and on specific symbols. We talked about the scratch board. We talked about this little percentage here.
Tips for organizing drawing boards
I think you’re up to speed on kind of all of the different options you have available to you, and now we’re going to get into some of the tips that I have for you. I use different drawing boards for different timeframes.
Sometimes I only want to annotate on a daily chart on let’s say board number five, where the only thing I’m looking at is, my little channels, my trend lines, where’s price behaving, so on and so forth.
Now I want to go to board six and use that as a daily chart of Boeing and so now I may want to look at the daily action here, and I want to say this is some pretty stiff horizontal resistance here.
And this is kind of the bottom end here, we had maybe a false breakdown, so on and so forth. But this is going to be my daily annotations, and then maybe I want to go to board seven and that’s going to be my monthly annotations.
My monthly timeframes is where I’m going to say, oh wow, look at this channel that’s developing here on the monthly. Wouldn’t this be one heck of a scary bear flag if this was created. So there it is, my monthly, I got my daily and then I got my weekly annotations. That’s one way you can split up boards.
Another way I like to split up boards is by using particular boards for alerts only. And so this is going to get into another video that we’re going to do on price alerts, but you can actually put on a trend line here, click on that trend line, set an alert for it, and you can have this just be a breakout Boeing.
This can be an alert and you can have a board that’s only going to show you alerts or when prices are hitting that level. It will be a email and potentially a text message to you.
Lastly, you could think of doing one single board as your notes, and you saw some notes on my chart at one point earlier in this video, but maybe I’m going to be taking notes here and saying, on 8-16-21, I thought Boeing would retrace for the next five days.
You could create a diary of sorts and you can start to use one board as a diary. You can check back on it and you can use that as a separate canvas to sort of put some thoughts down there and keep track of some of your ideas.
I think those are all, some pretty good ways to use boards. You could also separate by the type of drawing tool, so again you could have maybe, board number two is just your shapes, board number one maybe is just diagonal lines.
There’s no right or wrong answer obviously, I’m just spit firing at some different ways that I’ve used boards in the past, and approaches I’ve heard other traders use different boards in the past. I think ultimately it just comes down to your personal preference and finding what works for you, and obviously depends on how active you are and how quick you need to see a lot of these drawings turnover.
I think covers just about everything I wanted to talk about. We explained all the different options you have available, and we talked about some different ways to use drawing boards. I always like to end these videos asking for any of your suggestions.
If you’re a more intermediate advanced user of TC2000, what did I miss or what other tips do you have about drawing boards specifically? We’re not talking about the actual tools in this particular video, we just want to talk about the different boards. What other tips and suggestions do you have that I may have left out? Leave a comment below. I’d love to read them.
Don’t forget, we have more TC2000 guides on our channel as well as resources and downloads on our website.
That’s all folks. Have a great day, good luck trading, and thank you for watching!
Enjoy what you read? Share it below and be sure to tag @thetraderisk.