This reply is Edgy Can Short Term Trading Be More Profitable Than Long Term: Definitely, Yes. it's kind of impossible...to have a greater return by being long-term holding. but the keyword is CAN...the devil is in the details...if you're just a dumbass purely gambling...then no. you can make a return percentage of what hedge funds or mutual funds typically make in a year...in a day.
This is from something I wrote about twenty years ago. If anything, it's easier to time the market now.
Capital is not an edge, but quality of capital is. Most institutional investors can get stopped out of a trade. But if you have the ability to sustain volatility, there's a lot of opportunities that others can't pursue. It's one reason Warren Buffet has done so well: he never has to cut his position. Very few can hold their stock positions without some kind of redemption in scenario like 2008.
The only problem with the conclusions above is that the majority of the gains and losses come from like 10% of the days. So the timing works if you are 100% right, but it's very easy to be wrong as a few of the days are what differentiates the performance of both strategies. Miss a few big up days and all of a sudden the timing strategy is way behind the buy and hold.