Swing Trading

[Traderwannabe]

I would like to know if anyone on the forum is a successful swing trader, in and out of shares within a week or two. Or is long term investing really the best way to go? I have read a couple of books and would like to learn more before I start trading. Does anyone have any advice or books to recommend?

[Longhaul]

Yeah, that's my main approach. I try to follow momentum over a week or two.

Main indicators I use are MACD, DMI/ADX, followed by price support and resistance, RSI and OBV, and finally long term trend.

Don't forget to correlate daily charts with weekly charts too.

I find it has helped to follow a stock closely and get familiar with its ups and downs and general behaviour and market sentiment.

The New Trading for a Living (https://www.amazon.com/New-Trading-Living-Psychology-Discipline/dp/1118443926) is is a great book, revised in 2014.

Last words of advice, set stop losses and stick to them. If a trade doesn't go the way you were expecting it generally pays to get out early. Also trading is not about predicting the future (that's really hard) but reading the charts as they are.

Good luck.

*Forgot to add, beware of price movements on small volumes. I use Volume+ to help gauge momentum.

[Traderwannabe]

Thank you for your information :) Can I ask how many shares you watch at any one time?

[levin123]

I would like to know if anyone on the forum is a successful swing trader, in and out of shares within a week or two. Or is long term investing really the best way to go? I have read a couple of books and would like to learn more before I start trading. Does anyone have any advice or books to recommend?

I've dabbled in both 1-4 week swing trading and also longer term investing.

Agree with all the advice posted above. I would also add that I generally only swing trade Companies that I like on a fundamental level. That way if I miss the swing I'm happy to hold for a while.

I guess this is a bit of a convoluted strategy because I'm doing a bit of column A and a bit of column B, without focusing on one thing. However, I'm aware of this and so far it's worked well so I'm happy to stick to the part FA part swing-TA strategy for now!

[JBmurc]

1wk to couple of months Swing trading is my favourite trade not to stressfully short day trade or boring long ...but sadly sometimes I get lazy and my swing trade turns into a longer term hold like MKO which has increased to near on 200% recently(so happy with that change) ....NKP a swing trade gone wrong that now I have decided to keep longer term ....more incoming funds would be looking for a swing trade ...

You can do very well trading in and out of same companies with they do develop patterns like we had with ROC where it would trade over a few weeks from low 40's to high 40's and back over the longer timeframe you could double you money compared to just 20% etc if you just held ..

downside is you can sometimes miss out on more upside when you think you have made a good 20-30% profit to think see the company continue and become a 10 bagger ..like PGO for me

[levin123]

1wk to couple of months Swing trading is my favourite trade not to stressfully short day trade or boring long ...but sadly sometimes I get lazy and my swing trade turns into a longer term hold like MKO which has increased to near on 200% recently(so happy with that change) ....NKP a swing trade gone wrong that now I have decided to keep longer term ....more incoming funds would be looking for a swing trade ...

You can do very well trading in and out of same companies with they do develop patterns like we had with ROC where it would trade over a few weeks from low 40's to high 40's and back over the longer timeframe you could double you money compared to just 20% etc if you just held ..

downside is you can sometimes miss out on more upside when you think you have made a good 20-30% profit to think see the company continue and become a 10 bagger ..like PGO for me

Yes I've also missed out on some 2-5 baggers due to trading out too early.

However, in my case, freeing up that capital to trade more frequently increased my overall ROE above what it would have been if I had bought and hold on for a larger % gain per equity over a longer time period.