Trade of an evening after work for an hour ?? Lunch Time on a tablet ?? in the am before work depending on where you live time zone wise and if anything tradeable at that time. You haven't got to trade 8hrs per day to make a 2nd living off trading, 1 or 2 hours and big amounts will easily cover it.
$SPDR tracks the S&P500 and if the market in general goes up, SPDR goes up. Same with QQQ and some others. These are all ETFs or ETNs and trade just like stocks. Leveraged versions such as TQQQ or SQQQ work in similar manner except that they are designed to give higher maximum yields (and of course greater potential loss) at greater risk. Sometimes watching SPDR or QQQ can be like watching paint dry and you can use more action. Most of the time the unleveraged funds are better due to reduced risk to your investment or swing trading portfolio. Often the line between swing trading and investing is a fuzzy one. EOD refers to End Of Day price and volume. Most of the time you will be looking at daily charts, i.e. your bars will each cover a whole day. In this way, your attention is focused on the longer term trends. Your indicators can be anything from your Tarot cards to astrological charts to traveling forward in time. The old Mk1 eyeballs can be pretty good at figuring out trends along with the smushy gray stuff inside your skull. You should be able to look at a daily chart and get a pretty good idea of the trend. But most of us back this up with something such as VWAP or moving averages. Sometimes it is something more exotic like Ichimoku clouds or Alligator Oscillator or other improbable sounding things. VWAP is good because other people watch VWAP and the sentiment of the market can be kenned from it. 9EMA is popular. Some folks use a crossed moving average type thing. Me, I favor crossed Moving Volume Weighted Averages, one 3 bar and one 6 bar. I also usually have bollinger bands, either 9 or 20 bar on the chart, with upper and lower bands at 2 standard deviations away. Where theMVWAPs cross is usually a good buy or sell indicator, and sometimes I jump the gun and buy or sell as the two approach one another. Generally it is a good idea to use an indicator with a wide following so you are doing what everyone else is doing. I would urge you not to overthink this, though. The most important thing is to establish a set of trading rules for yourself and follow them.
Thanks, this is a really good post, I'm going to save this one. I definitely agree with you about looking at daily charts. Maybe even weekly? Are moving volume weighed averages a standard indicator as I don't see them on Trading View?
Yes. They call it "VWMA" in the built-in indicators. On any full chart, click on "Indicators" and choose "Built-ins". Scroll down and select "VWMA". To use my method, select it twice. You will now have two indicators named VWMA on your chart. You need to modify the settings so they aren't the same, at the very least. Else, you may as well have just one. Look at the first instance of VWMA. There is an eyeball looking icon that hides or shows it, in case your chart is too cluttered with indicators. The next icon puts you in the settings for it. The last, of course, deletes it. Open the settings. Set the inputs of the first one like above. Then the style. Color can be anything that is not confusing. Hit OK and then do the other one with a length of 6, and a strongly contrasting color that also is not confusing. Hit OK. Once you see something like this, experiment with different settings. Also I like to check another time frame on the chart before making a decision to buy or sell. For instance, if I am working a 5 minute chart, I will switch to 1 minute and see how it looks, too. Of course the smaller bar chart will react quicker, but the longer timeframe gives fewer false signals. Above is a day chart I brought up Friday when I bought some stuff to hold over the weekend and maybe beyond. You can see that when the gap begins to close, it is often a good time to make a move. When it has crossed over, the indication is pretty solid. It is having the volume in the equation that makes this more relevant, mechanically, than simple crossed price averages. Where ordinary crossed averages DO have an advantage, is that other traders are watching them, too, and you will if not buy or sell before the herd, at least buy or sell WITH the herd and not follow up in their trail dust. Try this with a couple dozen stocks at random and maybe the last couple dozen that you actually traded. Customize, and make it your own.