When creating and managing your portfolio, you might want to determine main revenue sources of companies in whose stocks you are willing to invest. In order to do that and also make sure your portfolio is properly diversified (or, on the contrary, sticks to a single field of industry), feel free to use industry classification present in several features of thinkorswim®. This classification complies with the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) so that you can learn right away where on the industry map a particular stock finds itself.
The highest level of the hierarchy is sector; as of November 2014, there are ten of them. Sectors are broken into industries whose number reaches 67. Finally, there are 156 sub-industries that define the lowest hierarchy level.
An example of industry classification: a symbol of a company of the Computer Hardware sub-industry will belong to the Computers & Peripherals industry and the Information Technology sector.
Where to find it:
1. Watch lists
When viewing any of your watch lists, you can add an industry classification column to it. This will allow you to see which industry classification units the instruments in that watch list belong to. In order to do that, right-click the header of the watch list and choose Customize... In the Available Items section of the dialog window, choose desirable classification units (Sector, Industry, Sub-Industry) and click Add Item(s). After clicking OK, your watch list will display the desired columns.
You can also view a watch list of instruments that belong to the same sector, industry, or sub-industry. In order to do that, click the "gear" button above a watch list and choose By industry in the menu. Choose a sector, then an industry and then a sub-industry.
2. Position Statement
You can group your positions based on which sectors they belong to. In order to do that, click the Show actions button on the right of the table header and choose Group symbols by -> Sector.
3. Stock Hacker
You can sort your results of the Stock Hacker search based on which sector, industry, or sub-industry they belong to. In order to do that, right-click the header of the Search Results table and choose Customize... In the Available Items section of the dialog window, choose desirable classification units (Sector, Industry, Sub-Industry) and click Add Item(s). After clicking OK, the Search Results table will display respective columns. In order to sort results by any of the classification items, click the header of the respective column.
Note that you can also narrow your search to stocks that belong to the same sector, industry, or sub-industry. In order to do that, use the Scan in drop-down list before performing the search. In this list, choose By industry, then specify a desired sector, industry, or sub-industry.
4. Heat Map
When viewing a Heat Map for a watch list, you can restrict it to instruments that belong to the same sector, industry, or sub-industry. In order to do that, click on the triangle button before the name of the watch list you would like to view. This will expand the list of sectors present in the watch list. Likewise, clicking on triangles before sector names will expand lists of available industries. Finally, if you prefer to narrow the Heat Map to a certain sub-industry, click on the triangle before the corresponding industry item and select the desired sub-industry from the expanded list. Note that a watch list only contains a certain number of instruments, thus your desired classification item may or may not be present in it.
5. Fundamentals
The Fundamentals functionality enables you to research company fundamentals based on the industry they belong to. Clicking on any of the present industries will open a list of instruments that belong to it. Choose an instrument from this list to view its fundamentals.