Swing trading

Swing trading is a speculative activity in financial markets where a tradable asset is held for between one to several days in an effort to profit from price changes or 'swings'. A swing trading position is typically held longer than a day trading position, but shorter than buy and hold investment strategies that can be held for months or years. Profits can be sought by either buying an asset or short selling.

Swing trading methods

Using a set of mathematically based objective rules for buying and selling is a common method for swing traders to eliminate the subjectivity, emotional aspects, and labor-intensive analysis of swing trading. The trading rules can be used to create a trading algorithm or "trading system" using technical analysis or fundamental analysis to give buy and sell signals.

Simpler rule-based trading approaches include Alexander Elder's strategy, which measures the behavior of an instrument's price trend using three different moving averages of closing prices. The instrument is only traded Long when the three averages are aligned in an upward direction, and only traded Short when the three averages are moving downward. Trading algorithms/systems may lose their profit potential when they obtain enough of a mass following to curtail their effectiveness: "Now it's an arms race. Everyone is building more sophisticated algorithms, and the more competition exists, the smaller the profits," observes Andrew Lo, the Director of the Laboratory For Financial Engineering, for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Swing

Swing or swinging may refer to:

Activity

Computing

Art, entertainment, and media

Dance

Stock trader

A stock trader or equity trader or share trader is a person or company involved in trading equity securities. Stock traders may be an agent, hedger, arbitrageur, speculator, stockbroker or investor. A stock investor is an individual or company who puts money to use by the purchase of equity securities, offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value (capital gains). This buy-and-hold long term strategy is passive in nature, as opposed to speculation, which is typically active in nature. Many stock speculators will trade bonds (and possibly other financial assets) as well. Stock speculation is a risky and complex occupation because the direction of the markets are generally unpredictable and lack transparency, also financial regulators are sometimes unable to adequately detect, prevent and remediate irregularities committed by malicious listed companies or other financial market participants. In addition, the financial markets are usually subjected to speculation.