Interactive Brokers IBKR Desktop Tutorial (2025) | Full Beginner’s Guide

In this video, we're going to go over the new Interactive Brokers platform, IBKR Desktop. Unlike their original platform that's been there since early 2000s, which is TWS, Trader Workstation. Comparing to that, this new platform, the Interactive Brokers Desktop, is a lot more beginner friendly and less complicated. We will go over how to customize the layout, chart settings, indicators, order entry, hotkeys, watchlist and using the screener. So by the end of this video, you'll know how to customize and use this IBKR Desktop platform to fit your own trading styles. My name is Shea, aka Humble Trader. I've been trading for over 10 years now, and Interactive Brokers was the first brokerage I started out many years ago, and I'm still using it even till this day. So rest assured you're in good hands. I'll leave all the timestamps to different chapters down below so you can follow along. Now without further ado, remember to hit the like button down below. I really appreciate that. Now let's get started. So let's start with the IBKR Desktop layout now. You can see in my layout, I labeled it day trading. You can rename all these layouts later. I have two charts here, order entry, order details, order table, portfolio, watchlist over here. So how you get there is you can start with some of their default templates. Click this icon here and click basic trading. So that's a good one to get started with. So once you're in basic trading, you can see this is basically what I have over there. So we can customize it a little bit here. I want to have two charts. We can have the order table on the bottom, maybe have more charts, more than one. So let's move this together, move the watchlist. And we're going to open up one more chart. So to bring up a new window, go to this icon here, click it. And what we're looking for is a chart, which is here. It's a chart here. Okay, that's good. Let's put them side by side. I usually like to have daily chart on left-hand side and intraday chart on the right-hand side. Okay, let's see what else we can put on the bottom hand corner here. We can put quote details over here. So that's how I usually like to have this quote details. We already have orders table, about news, we have that already. You can have option chain if you trade options, but I don't. But we can just pull it up here. Option chain, order table, let's put them side by side here. Okay, we're just going to remove it, sorry about that. Okay, so this is a really simple layout, not too fancy, they don't have that many options. You can see that they are missing, for example, montage, which is level two, and they're also missing time and sales. So that's something you want to keep in mind of. So we're going to put order, rapid order entry here, or you can put, we already have orders table. Okay, we're going to put rapid order entry. Took me a while, but this is the layout I usually like. You can see order entry on left-hand side here, quote details, something about the stock, all the details here. Order table, showing you all the orders I took, you have the daily chart, which we'll go over the chart settings, daily chart, intraday charts here, and we have the portfolio, all the current positions, watch list, and news over here. Now you can see that with all these windows, there's this link, different color link icon here, that just links all the windows together. So when I change a ticker symbol, let's say I'm changing this to meta, they all update it together. So for example, maybe you can have some charts that's different link, linking to a different chart. Some people like to do that. So that will work as well. But for this demo, I'm just going to link them all together. Okay, so they are all the orange link. This is how you make sure all the windows are in synced. So when you change a ticker, it updates all together. Okay, so now that we talked about the layout, it's pretty simple. Let's talk about chart settings now. So you can see we have the two charts here. Let's go to, let's start, let's maximize this chart so we can see it easier here. Okay, so this is a pretty intuitive chart. Pretty much, this is a trading view chart. So it's a lot more intuitive than the classic charts they had on their Interactive Brokers TWS over there. So this is where you change your timeframe. So you can change it to five minutes, daily, one hour. You can start a once that you use a lot. So I use five minute, two minute a lot. You can see that shows up on the bar here and one day chart. So then I can just click this, switch around really quickly here after you start it. Okay, so that's very useful. Next, let's talk about chart settings. So right click, go to settings. We're going to configure some of this, okay? So make sure the time zone, like I don't know why, I'm in Vancouver right now. I don't know where you are, but I'm on the West Coast time. So obviously I want to change this back to New York time. So click okay, that should update the time. That's good. Go back to settings. I'm going to click that, enable this and the colors look fine to me. Status line. Let's see. This is setting up here. I honestly don't really look at that, so I'm going to hide it. Indicators. You can see it shows you the indicators on the left. I do want the title. I do want the value. What is this background thing again? I think it just shows you the opacity of the background. Okay, so you can see indicators over here. So pretty simple chart settings. I want to see if I can remove the grid actually. I thought I could. If you go to canvas, you can see the crosshair. That's fine. Grid lines. I want to say none. Remove the grid. So you can see the grid at the back. It's gone. You can change it to a gradient if you want. I kind of like that. You can change the color if you wish. So you can see like a gradient. It's this color. Like that. If you wish. Makes things more three dimensional or you can completely destroy your eyes and do something like this. Whoa. Wow. Actually that doesn't look too bad, but maybe another day. So let's switch that back. So yeah, you can play around with this. It's very much customizable. Crosshair you can change the color. Not all that good stuff. I think we do need something really important is we want to have extended hours trading. Okay, so you can only turn on the extended hours trading when you're in the intraday chart. That makes sense. Daily chart doesn't really show that. So make sure you are in an intraday chart. Five minutes, two minutes. Go to chart settings. Go to symbol. And make sure you have extended hours trading to show pre-market and after hours. Now you can see that we have after hours right now in this color. Pre-market is in this kind of beige-y looking brown color thing. You know what I mean. But you need to see both the pre-market and after hours. Okay, so let's go over the exciting part, which is indicators now. So you can see right now the only indicator we have is volume at the bottom. Let's change that because as you may know, the more indicators you have, the better you'll be at trading. That's not true. Don't actually do that. But I understand some people like indicators. So click indicators and these are like the classic trading view indicators. So I'm just going to go to get VWAP. That's the one I use a lot. I also use the EMA. So you can see there's like moving average exponential. I can add that and go in. You can see these are your, you can collapse this. These are the indicators. You can go in and edit the settings by clicking this icon here. So let's see, how do I edit the settings? Go to settings. Let's say I want like a 98 EMA. I want to change it to orange. So this is the settings. So you can see my VWAP is now blue. My EMA is now this orange color and volume at the bottom. Now volume, I prefer to have it in like a separate box, separate from the chart. So what you can do is right click on the volume, move to new pan below. So you can see that separates the volume from the chart. I like that more because so I can see the volume a lot easier. So I can also add like a volume indicator. Go to settings, add volume MA and that shows you the volume or moving average. I like to use 14. EMA and there you go. So you have your volume average at the bottom. So this is how you really quickly add indicators and hide them if you wish. Okay. So now that you have the indicators and you have the layout or the settings for this particular chart, I want to save it. So you can go to this icon here, save indicator template. So let's just say this is an intraday with VWAP. I'm going to save the interval so later on I can open it on the chart. So I'm going to save this. Okay. So now you saved it. All right. So what you can do right now is you can see instead of having to adjust everything again on this new chart, I can just go here and pull up that setting we just did with the indicators. Oh, but I guess it didn't save the chart settings with all the background. So let me do that one more time. I think with a chart background and settings, it's a different one here. I think it's a chart setting here. Okay. Go to go click the chart settings here. Oh, what did I do? So actually did something. You can click undo to move that back. Okay. So it's not the end of the world when you see a random crap like that happen. So click chart settings. You can save this entire layout to, I don't know, intraday five minutes. So you save that after you save the layout, go here, click layout, load layout. The one I just did is this one. So you can see now it looks exactly like the copy you just made. So this is a really quick and fast way to update all of your charts. So this one, I'm going to go back to the daily chart and I'm going to remove the EMA. So the VWAP and the VMA, I can click and delete. I guess I cannot, I can't, I'm going to change the, I'm going to remove some of these indicators. So delete, remove, remove. So I'm going to go back and add an SMA, simple, just moving average, and I'm going to add, so it is 200 SMA. I'm going to change the color to pink. And then that's it. I'm going to change the width. So over here, I have my charts on the daily and the intraday chart. So let's talk about order entry next. You can see that on this paper trading account, I kind of moved the portfolio window down here so it's easier to see. And then I'm short NVIDIA and this is my average, I'm short at $95 or so. Okay. So what we're going to do is let's close this position first after hours. So go back to the order entry. So to close that position, because I'm short, I need to buy 10 shares. Okay. Cause I'm short 10 shares. So I need to buy to cover. So we're going to buy the limit price right now at what's the bid price right now. That's a thing like doesn't have level two on this platform. You can see now it's trading at around like 96, 90. So if you click ask, that loads it. If you click bid, you can see whatever you click here, it loads automatically. So that's good to know. So I'm just going to get out here and I'm going to put fill outside of regular hours trading day and force overnight plus day. That's fine. And then I'm going to get out of this position. Okay. So buy, submit, buy order, cause I want to get out. You see a confirmation window. It shows you how much commissions, how much you're using, what's your current equity, all that stuff transmit. Let's see if we get out at $97. So this is my order. I want to get out. Let me get out please. So you can see the price has now moved up to 9709. My order submitted at $97. So that's why it's not being filled right now, especially after hours. If that happens, you can go to your orders table. So you see all of the pending orders, there was a checkmark that means it was already filled. Oh, it got filled just now. So I bought Nvidia 10 shares at $97 and you can see that I have no more open position here for Nvidia. It's only outside of regular hours trading that you need to enable this. Otherwise when you're trading during 930am till 4pm, you don't need to click this. So let's say I want to buy Nvidia again, let's just buy a different stock, let's buy something like Tesla. I want to buy Tesla again, let's say 10 shares, Tesla. I'm going to buy on the bid, so let's see if we get filled. Fill outside of market, regular market hours. Outside of market hours, you cannot use market order, right? Market order only works during regular hours trading. So I cannot use that, but you can set a stop for your existing position if you need. So this is how you toggle different orders. You have buy here, you have sell or short here. But now I'm trying to buy. So I'm buying on the bid for 10 shares, filled outside regular hours trading. Now you can preview this to show you how much money you're using, what's your account size, equity with loan, what's your margin, maintenance, all that good stuff. Or you can save your order. So if I save my order, it's just saved. It's not sent to a market. So you can see on the chart, you see this gray icon here? That means the order is pending there. You're not sending it to the market, it's just sitting there. And when you're ready, you can open it up here, double click it to open it up. I guess you cannot double click. Nevermind, you have to right click, go to model, you can send it, transmit. So now it's going to send, transmit. So order pending, order submitted. So it's now waiting. Let's see if we get filled. Our order was $225.18. Yeah, the bid is at $225.47 right now, that's why we're not getting filled. So if you want to get filled right away, we're going to have to move it up. You can see I can drag this order to move it up. So right now the ask is at $225.63. So let's see if we can do that. So you can see order submitted, $225.63. OK, we got filled. OK, great. So that's how you enter orders, and sell them, and exit, and using stop loss as well. The one thing that's really important, once again, there's no level two, and there's no time and sales. So for some traders that might be a con in terms of this pretty simple beginner platform, but I think for new traders starting out, that's totally fine. I personally didn't really start using level two or time and sales until year two or year three of my trading, and I turned out OK. OK, this is related to the order entry we just talked about. Let's talk about hotkeys. They have some limited options for hotkeys. So you have to go to Settings, go to Hotkeys. And you can do all that stuff like platform controls and all that. But for me, let's go to order entry right now. So you can see the dropdown of how it's configured. So let's try something. Let's do buy limit, Control-B. Let me see the keystroke. Buy limit, that's good. Order type, limit, that's fine. Default, you can set an ask to get in right away. Offset it, that means let's say the ask is at $25. If you are short or over by $0.02, you can still have it filled. So I'm just going to do maybe $0.01 amount. You can set your amount as well. I'm just going to do maybe 10 shares. Or you can use dollar amount, so that's good. I'm going to use $100, $500. Let's see if that works. Time in force, good to cancel. I don't know if it'll fill after hours. Let's try this, okay? So this is a Control-B for buy limit, save it. Let's say sell limit. Sell limit, offset, you know, let's also do 500. Good to cancel, limit order 10. Okay, let's see if this works. But because it's after hours, so I don't know if it'll trigger automatically. I'm interested to find out. So Control-B, oh, so I guess that just loads it. You can see when I do the hotkey, it just loads it here. That's good, I guess, but I need to manually click fill outside of market hours. So that shows that, accept. So you can see my order submitted, because remember we said we're using $500 to buy Tesla. So that worked out well. Now let's try it when we sell. Quantity, you can see automatically loads to $500. Again, you can do shares if you want, like right now we're at 12 shares. We can get out the whole position, go to position 12 shares if we want. And let's see if we can get out on the ask. Submit order. Oh, actually, you have to click fill outside of regular hours trading, okay? Sell, transmit, order filled, nice. So we got filled, okay? So it's actually not bad, not bad so far, even after hours. I think definitely there's limits to what you can do with the hotkeys, but I mean, it has all the basics here. I don't know how much more you can add. You can only buy limit, sell limit, buy market, sell market. That's about it. Yeah, and you have some really basic controls here. But it's good for most new traders to get started. If you're enjoying the video so far, please remember to drop a like down below. Also you can sign up for my free weekend watch list that I send out every single Sunday. You'll include some trade ideas, three to four stocks I'm watching for day trading or swing trading. So check that out. It's all free down below. Okay, so now that we covered order entries and hotkeys, let's talk about watch lists over here, which is this window here. Let's maximize it a little bit here. So pretty straightforward. You can create multiple watch lists here. So let's create a new one, watch list, add new. My list. Now these are the ones I already have. Let's do a new watch list. Let's just say some recent stocks that I was watching, MLGO. What else? Corsair. And let's rename this watch list. Okay. So let's see if we can customize the different columns on this watch list now. So go to this settings icon. So you can see right now there's like financial instruments, ticker names. That's good. Bid ask. I don't need that. I just need last to change. Trend. Yeah, sure. Why not? It gives you like a little snapshot. I kind of like that. What else? Position. Sure. Let's do that. Daily P&L, daily P&L percentage. That's good. Let's get volume here so you can add stuff here. Over here. Let's see what else we can do. If you trade options, maybe implied volatility, well options implied volatility here. You can do that. Okay. That's a lot already. So let's see. So you can resize it here. Position average price. So then if you have, if we go back to some of my favorites, you should see that we have an existing position. Oh, now it's zero. Tesla and Meta. Oh, we have Palantir. Okay. So if we add Palantir to it, you'll see that we have 200 shares of Palantir in here. And daily P&L, average price, implied volatility, all that good stuff. The trend is actually pretty good. Like it shows you how the stock was trading for the day. Everything was green until it's not. Okay. So watch this. I usually have it tucked away over here. You can double click it to change the stock on your, from your watch list. As long as it's linked to everything here. So yeah, so pretty good. So this will be the layout and different windows I would use for day trading. Now if you're trading options, which I know a lot of traders will actually use the IBKR desktop. This is the layout you can use. Again, go to click here and go to options trading. This is what it comes up with all the different strike prices, the watch list, options chain, the charts, the charts, the graph. You can see your performance, breakeven analysis, max return, et cetera, max loss. And they also have like a strategy builder here somewhere. I saw it before. You can test and build different strategies. Next let's talk about the screener. So next you can see on the left hand side, there's a couple more things you can do. News analysis. That's really nice. It shows you like different news sources. You can see what's going on today in the market, language settings, watch list. So these are all the news that's pertaining to the stocks in the watch list. Portfolio news, news related to the stocks you own. So that's good to know. But now let's focus on screener over here. So screeners, it's pretty user friendly, but again, it's pretty basic. It'll give you the basic, which is like a percentage gapper or loser. That's about it. So let's go to create a new screener, shall we? So by default, there's like a lot of screeners and they're all pretty similar. It's pretty basic, but it's enough to get the job done. So let's create like a simple gap scanner that allows you to scan for gap ups or gap downs every day. So let's start with, you can see on default, there's a lot of different ones. Let's go to gainer here. So that's to scan for stocks that are 500 million to maximum. Average volume, let's look for anywhere with minimum of 800K. Change percentage, let's look for gappers. So let's look for stocks that have gapped up at least 5%. So you can see that narrows down a lot. You can even add other things like, for example, like EMAs, after hours change, percentage. Let's say like, I don't know, 1% minimum, and that'll show up here, I believe. Okay, yeah, here. So that narrows down a lot, right? So you want to have your filters, but also don't be too narrowed down. So you can see these are the results, and I can sort them by descending order or ascending order. So let's customize the columns here. I think, I guess I cannot customize it. Can I? Nope. Right, no, nothing. I was going to remove some of these names, which I cannot do. I don't know why. So these are the scanners, pretty simple. That's about it. If you double click, it'll show you the chart here. You can also see, if you go back to the screener, it shows you percentage, last, volume, even PE, which is not really important to what we're doing, but, and you can save screener. So save screener, you can just call it like gap scan. We can create a new one too. Save it. Okay. Let's go back to US stocks. If you go to my screeners, you'll see the one we just created. You can hide this column here. So if you don't want the settings, you just, oh, no, don't delete it, or we can just duplicate. Let's say we create like a gap down, scan gap down. So going back, average volume, again, maybe 800K, change percentage. I'm looking for the biggest losers now, this time. So let's do negative, remove that, and negative one. So that shows me all the top losers. So you can sort it. So the biggest losers are these ones, okay? You can also change the price. So last, I want at least a $1 stock. So you can see some of the penny stocks are gone when the lab price has now a filter. So this is how you customize your scanners. Average volume, again, I want at least, what did I do before, 800K, average volume, average volume. Oh, this is a dollar volume. Okay. We don't need this. So if you don't want a filter, you can delete it. So this is all I want, last, change percentage, average volume, et cetera. Market cap, again, minimum 800 mil. You can see that changed the results quite a bit. So this is a gap down scanner, and you can use the same settings to create a gap scan. Oh, I forgot to save. Save. If we go to gap scan, yeah, it takes a bit to load, and I'm just going to sort it. Then you have the top gainers on the day. Okay. We went over a lot today on the IBKR desktop platform. Overall, I think it's great for beginners. We went over the charting, we went over screener, watchlist, even order entry, hotkeys, chart settings, indicators. If you have any questions on anything I went over or I did not cover, feel free to ask me down below in the comments, I'll do my best to answer you. Also don't forget, I have a free weekend watchlist that I send out every single Sunday. You can get that for free down below. And if you want to learn more about other brokers I recommend for trading, then you should check out this video over here.