Article Advise

submitted: May 22nd 2008 | by: CarlG.Robertts | Total views: 4 | Word Count: 558 | |

Developing 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?

Age may affect the type of strategy that you should choose for stock trading. We will discuss many of the strategies that are used in today's market.

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.

As with all other forms of trading, there are always disadvantages. Day trading is a lot of work; you have to remain vigilant throughout the stock trading day. In addition, since brokers charge a commission on each trade, your gains have to outpace the cost of frequent trading.

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.

Opportunities for swing trading can often be found using technical analysis. Typically, the aim is for a higher profit margin than that of day trading. Of course, this also means a higher potential level of risk per trade.

Long-Term Swing Trading - If you take this approach, you are basically following the same strategy as the swing trader described above, except that you hold the stocks longer. Trades are usually made over a period of months. You can use this approach to trading when focusing on stock indexes and mutual funds, or through technical and fundamental analysis of individual stocks.

Long-term Swing Trading - This swing trader is similar to the above, but instead of a days-to-weeks turnaround, this trader is focused on weeks-to-months turnaround. Focus on the indexes, mutual funds timing, and technical and fundamental analysis of stocks is commonly used in this type of trading. These longer turnaround times allow for less 'noise' found in most of the markets. Smaller market movements have less of an affect on this type of trading. The yield of this type of stock trading can be as high.

Buy and Hold Trading - The investor that uses this strategy is often one who buys it and holds onto it for years. This type of trader may use a great deal of fundamental analysis before picking this type of trade and understand market sentiment analysis. The profits can be great with this strategy. It usually has few costs for trading when compared with shorter-term methods.

A buyer who uses Buy and Hold Trading generally don't have a long-term trading goal, except to gather stocks that they will cling to. For this reason, it is best for the buy and hold buyer to begin contemplating a strategy that is similar to the long-term swing trader. This will help you define your objectives and what to expect if the market does not go your way.

About the Author

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