That is excellent! Keep it up! It's hard to be a profitable trader, let alone having a performance like yours!
I'd say three months is fairly consistent, but honestly anyone's opinion of a timeframe before one can be called consistent is just that, an opinion. Anyway, my input on this thread is mostly just this. In the last couple weeks, I have made more money in positions I held overnight than I have in positions I left intraday. I realize a lot of this is due to limitation of not being a qualified pattern day trader and need to limit my intraday trades to 3 per 5 day period. I therefore need to seek best entry positions, and those tend to carry me overnight. Once I break $25,000 in my account, I am sure my opinion will change, however I have always envisioned being a hybrid day trader/swing trader since I started this venture. So far, I have gained 30% in since two monday's ago, so I don't think that's so bad for someone who isn't allowed to day trade yet.
Swing traders *should* have done well this past month. The market has gone straight up, and most swing traders, especially newer ones will be biased long. It's great that some of you are making money now, but don't get a false sense of confidence out of this move.
I agree with this 100%. The past 5 weeks are out of the ordinary. Even the media kept saying last week the Dow had the best 4-week uprun since the 1930's. A lot of people can make good money in a straight bull market. What makes a great trader is to be able to keep consistently profiting no matter what the market condition is: bull, bear, sideways.
Actually a lot of the market has been trending downward and just reversed this past week, though honestly I guess that depends on what time frames you are looking at. Yeah since the begining of march the markets were trending up, but started falling again at the beginning of the week. It just bounced again on wednesday. I made money on the way down and made money on the way back up.
All these morons making such a wild claim as this OP, especially when the market is so frothy, only goes to show their utterly noob nature. I'm sure you noobs will claim that you "swung" for the fence since the day when we made an unannounced visit to the devil at 666. Yeah, right!
Over the 4 years ive been trading, I guess 3 months is little to nothing, but I've learned a lot sinse then, and my trading has, IMO improved 10 fold just over last year, as I know so much more now. I'm not bashing day traders, hell if i had enough capital, I'd probably give it a second shot too and be a hybrid swing/ day trader. Unfortuntly I had to live off my trading funds from being unemplyed and so my account is small now. I started with 32k, so I have a lot to rebuild. I'll deposit another 5 figures when I have a full year or mostly a full year of green months. I think swing trades are a minority here on ET. Seems most the threads and/or questions asked are about day trading. I agree with the other poster who said, its not TF that matters as long as your profitable. I will say that swing traders, at least for new trades probably have a better chance of survival. The debate on intraday to overnight trading, and which one is more risky, and more profitable, will go on and on for many more threads to come, thats for sure. cm69 (blog http://nathanstradingblog.blogspot.com/)