Still sounds like a job to me. If it's what you do for a living I guess it's alright. You can retire to swing trading when you are ready.
I was initially a profitable (lucky?) swing trader, but was dumb enough to be sucked into the world of day trading. When I come full circle I will be swing trading primarily.
Day trading was for me the most stressful method I tried. Staring at 1 and 5 mn graphs, buying and selling against TA lines.... It felt mechanical, an automated system could do better than me second guessing my triggers every few minutes. After 2-3 hours of this I'd made 30 or so trades and ended with a mediocre win rate, certainly not worth the stress. But I'd gone to day trading after discovering and failing to understand a downtrending market in 2021-23 that wiped out most of my winnings of 2019-2020. I'd lost confidence in myself and tried something new. I pretty much stopped trading the first 8 months of 2024 and rejoined the fun around Trump's election. I've regained confidence in how I used to trade, evaluating big picture against short term trends, and taking advantage of the market's swings tied to this administration. I've learned from past mistakes not to chase rockets and I no longer trade a falling market. I'm now on 10 days/4 months graphs which give me the visuals to gauge the swings. The emotional challenge is not to exit on -20% or +20% but to stick to the plan. Latest mistake? Took a 20% loss selling TSLA which the next day and over a couple of weeks swung back to what could have been a 5% win. Latest success? Caught VST at 115 on the reverse. Holding on to 150. Live and learn
Day traders shouldn't scalp. That's the error. You should try to understand and process the market... anticipate and capture that one big move, or two, of the day. Just one trade per day Your latest venture foray into swinging...it kind of sounds like you are just observing, waiting, gambling, hoping to snap things out of the air Ultimately, the key to winning in trading is understanding, dissection and processing of the trade. So many people treat the market passively like a casino slot machine gambler, sitting there hoping Bee Vic
Perhaps it was my luck/expectation that the market would crash and hand me the opportunity to buy low. I have a certain degree of confidence that my sell will trigger within a couple of weeks. I only trade shares of a handful of tech sector companies that I've become familiar with over the past 6 years. I don't day trade, primarily because I'm based in Singapore and US markets opens at 10:30 pm. When we moved here in 2019 I would trade til 3-4 am and that just wasn't pleasant. I only did it because I was successful during that period and the money was worth the trouble. The luxury of not being financially dependent on this activity is that I can wait for clearer signs of swings.
I've been trading for some time and my body and mind still feels awkward to operate from Pacific Standard Time, 6:30am...it's not till around 10am when I feel fully alert. I should move to an Eastern Standard Time city. Swing trading isn't anymore easier or practical compared to day trading. It's the same generalized concept of analyzing that timeframe picture frame box, but in a day scale. The reason so many people fail at day trading is because they have learned it wrongly. Are approaching it wrongly. F'n demon course sellers out there. Like I said, don't scalp. But sense and anticipate the greater wider picture. And capture that one large movement of the day in one trade. You are not dissecting hard enough, questioning hard enough all the variables in play. I wish I could be more precise, but I'm not willing to give anything away
Just ran across this quote from Buffet. I think it applys here. “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
I did that for a couple of years. It was a party while the market was going to the moon and made me think I was really good at this trading thing. Then the market dipped, and it wasn't fun anymore. I'm glad it did or I wouldn't have learned any lessons and would have bitterly wondered why I spent so many years going to a job when I could have been rich at 30 simply trading. Swing trading works for me because it gives me some distance that day trading doesn't. I'm not going to short a crashing tech market to go long on the reverse.... Too much stress!