How to pull up the SPX index ticker in Interactive Brokers

The Trader Workstation (TWS) platform from Interactive Brokers is definitely not the most user friendly platform.

You'd think that something as simple as wanting to see a chart for SPX should be as easy as typing “SPX” into the ticker selector, and you'd be done.

Let's give that a try. I'll type “SPX” into a ticker selector, and I'm shown a dropdown dialog box with various things I can select.
We do see a section for the SPX Index, but there's nothing in that section that I can select in order to get the SPX index itself.

Since the SPX Index is not on that list, we have to search for it.
Click on the “Find” button down on the bottom right hand side and you'll now get a dialog box showing you all of the tickers that have a partial match to the text “SPX”.

Depending on which data feeds you subscribe to, your may get a dialog box showing you what you see above, or you may have even more matches come up.

Those of you with a good eye will see that we have the “SPX INDEX” entry listed as the third last entry, but your dialog box may not show this result on the first page. It may be buried deep down.

We can filter down the full list of tickers shown by specifying that we only want to see results where the ticker is an index. This should make the “SPX INDEX” entry easy to see. Click on it, and then click on the OK button.

After this multi-step process, you should be rewarded with being able to see a chart of the SPX index.

Really easy and intuitive, right?

Well, the good news is that once you've gone through this process once, then the “SPX INDEX” will be shown as one of the recent ticker symbols in the ticker drop-down field, and it's easy to re-select it later on.

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