Depends on your personaility, you could trade long term with a job and screw your job up worrying / checking your positions all day, or you could trade short term, just at your lunch break or after work and have it not effect your job. You could make enough* in a hour or 2 after work and grow an account to make it worth while, after work. * when you get good, which may never happen, tip 1 walk away from forums and others that tell you how to trade it's 99% BS, find your own way!
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% The answer is yes; I like medium term trends myself- commissions do NOt mean much in med trends.You may prefer the book Market Makers Edge, he likes short term trends+ 6 month charts. Wisdom is profitable to direct
Losses hurt a fund a lot more than gains help it, so simply because of that mathematical certainty it means long-term trading is probably going to be more profitable for most people. Sure there are short term traders who are very good and should stick to what they do, but we're talking about one in a million kind of numbers. For the vast majority of people, safer more predictable longer-term trading is going to come out ahead. Now of course bear in mind short-term / long-term means entirely different things depending on what you're trading. For equities long-term can mean years, but for option trading long-term might mean 2-3 month option cycles. I trade 2-4 week cycles and would consider that medium term.
When it comes to playing the markets (which by definition is a speculative vehicle), cost basis and time horizon are the most important factors. Daytraders/short term traders can make money as long as they have a well defined game plan AND enough equity to stomach the drawdowns. If you're playing the overseas markets, then you can trade outside of your work hours at your full time job. Or trade some futures products during your off hours. However, one way to succeed at long term trading is to dollar cost averaging OVER TIME in an S&P index fund as the market pulls back, and then waiting for a rally to break the prior highs. We often hear this over and over again, yet it seems so simply we sometimes ignore it. Just look at the chart of the S&P index or the Dow Jones for the past 100 years, what is the pattern? It's LOW from the left, HIGH to the right, even though there are times where volatility increases and the market pulls back viciously.