User:Nasdack/Thinkorswim

Thinkorswim by TD Ameritrade (branded as "thinkorswim" and often referred to as "tos") is a trading platform for stock, options and futures traders.

Installation

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Installing by running installer scripts directly is messy and insecure. Make and install a PKGBUILD instead, even better upload it to the AUR, see also Java package guidelines. (Discuss in User talk:Nasdack/Thinkorswim)

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: The official website now recommends Zulu OpenJDK 11. (Discuss in User talk:Nasdack/Thinkorswim)

While no official support exists for Arch Linux specifically, there is a broad installation approach for most Linux distributions.

Install jre8-openjdk before proceeding. As per its installation page, thinkorswim requires Java 1.8.0_60 JRE to run.

Download the thinkorswim installation script, or get it by following the instruction given in the official website.

Execute the script by running:

$ sh thinkorswim_installer.sh

When prompted, it is recommended to install thinkorswim into your /home/$USER/thinkorswim directory to avoid permissions issues, rather than /opt/thinkorswim.

Java environment versioning

You may find it necessary to run archlinux-java status to list your installed java versions, and set java-8-openjdk/jre as the default by running

$ archlinux-java set java-8-openjdk/jre

According to the official instruction, as for July 26 2021, it needs to be run with zulu-11-bin^AUR, which can be set by running

$ archlinux-java set zulu-11

Configuration

Since thinkorswim is a Java application, creating a .desktop file in /.local/share/applications or /usr/share/applications is recommended as it enables application indexing.

Here is an example configuration. Replace the $USER parameter with your own username.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=thinkorswim
GenericName=Trading platform
Comment=Trading platform
Icon=thinkorswim
Exec=/home/$USER/thinkorswim/thinkorswim 
Path=/home/$USER/thinkorswim
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Java;

Troubleshooting

If thinkorswim hangs on "installing updates" when starting up, configuring the system with some additional name servers to the system, e.g. Google's name servers, may resolve the issue.