Profit From Choosing The Right Stock Trading Strategy
Posted by: Carl G. Robertts in Finance, tags: FinanceDeveloping a stock trading strategy that is compatible with your needs, expectations, and personality is the single-most important component of stock trading. First, determine your threshold for risk. Are you comfortable with making short-term investments and paying close attention to the ups and downs of the stock market?
Even factors such as age can have an impact on the decisions you make in stock trading. A few stock trading strategies used today are:
Day Trading - An intraday trader is a person who buys and sells during the day. They make most of their purchases throughout the day. This strategy allows you avoid overnight hold exposures. This gives you the advantage of both longs and shorts during the quick swings that may move up or down throughout the day.
Quicker, smaller profits can result from a higher percentage of winning trades, thus reducing risk. Reality check: This type of trading requires vigilance. You must pay attention to the market during the day. This strategy can prove costly when making frequent trades because of transacion costs.
Swing Trading - Instead of day trading, you can hold your position in the market longer, for days or weeks, and look for opportunities to make larger profits. This type of trading is called swing trading. Because you are making fewer trades, you don’t incur as many commission charges. The profits can be larger and you are less likely to be pressured into making a mistake.
Swing traders frequently use technical analysis to determine when they should buy and sell a stock. The key points are identified based on the percentage of profit that the swing trader wishes to hit. It is important to keep in mind that typically the higher the percentage, the higher the risk. Because you are making fewer trades, you do have to go for a higher profit on each trade, so this additional risk has to be taken into account. In addition, you have to consider the risks associate to be exposed to market fluctuations for a longer period of time.
Long-term Swing Trading - The investor, who prefers to swing trade long term, is similar to the Swing Trader discussed previously. However, this investor usually tries to keep their stocks over weeks and even months or years. Long Term Swing Traders will concentrate on trading the indexes. Also they will time mutual funds and research the fundamental and technical analysis of the stocks that they have purchased.
The advantage to taking a longer-term approach is that you avoid being distracted by noise in the data, which occurs in all markets. Small fluctuations are less important because you are looking at longer-term trends, though you cannot ignore them entirely. Again, the longer you are holding the position, the greater the profit percentage you need to shoot for. In the case of long-term swing trading, you may want to set a profit target much higher than those found in day trading. The disadvantage to this approach is that you are not well positioned to capitalize on any short-term movements in the market, and your risk may grow with the amount of time the stock is held.
Buy and Hold Trading - In this approach, you hold stocks for years at a time. If you choose them correctly, you can make a good profit with very little cost or effort beyond the initial selection of the stocks. Unfortunately, in many cases this approach is more aptly named the “buy and forget” strategy.
Many investors who hold stocks for a long period of time are not actively carrying out a long-term trading strategy, but just picking up stocks and holding on to them for no particularly good reason. It may generally be better, even if you plan on holding on to a stock for a long time, to approach trading as a long-term swing trader. That way, if the stock does become less attractive over time, you are positioned to minimize your losses and maximize your gains. Go into the market with clear goals, and you will be better prepared.
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