HAVE A ROCKING WEEK END

Reviewing Different Types of Traders

Before we focus on swing trading, let's review all the other major styles of equity trading:

Scalping - The scalper is an individual who makes dozens or hundreds of trades per day, trying to "scalp" a small profit from each trade by exploiting the bid-ask spread. (You can read about scalping in Introduction to Types of Trading: Scalpers.)

Momentum Trading - Momentum traders look to find stocks that are moving significantly in one direction on high volume and try to jump on board to ride the momentum train to a desired profit. (You can read about momentum trading in Introduction to Types of Trading: Momentum Traders.)

Technical Trading - Technical traders are obsessed with charts and graphs, watching lines on stock or index graphs for signs of convergence or divergence that might indicate buy or sell signals. (You can read about technical trading in Introduction to Types of Trading: Technical Traders.)

Fundamental Trading - Fundamentalists trade companies based on fundamental analysis, which examines things like corporate events such as actual or anticipated earnings reports, stock splits, reorganizations or acquisitions. (You can read about fundamental trading in Introduction to Types of Trading: Fundamental Traders.)

The Right Stock

The first key to successful swing trading is picking the right stocks. The best candidates are large-cap stocks that are among the most actively traded stocks on the major exchanges. In an active market, these stocks will swing between broadly defined high and low extremes, and the swing trader will ride the wave in one direction for a couple of days or weeks only to switch to the opposite side of the trade when the stock reverses direction.

The Right Market

It should be noted that in either of the two market extremes, the bear-market environment or raging bull market, swing trading proves to be a rather different challenge than in a market that is between these two extremes. In these extremes, even the most active stocks will not exhibit the same up-and-down oscillations that they would when indexes are relatively stable for a few weeks or months. In a bear market or a raging bull market, momentum will generally carry stocks for a long period of time in one direction only, thereby confirming that the best strategy is to trade on the basis of the longer-term directional trend.

The swing trader, therefore, is best positioned when markets are going nowhere - when indexes rise for a couple of days and then decline for the next few days only to repeat the same general pattern again and again. A couple of months might pass with major stocks and indexes roughly the same as their original levels, but the swing trader has had many opportunities to catch the short-term movements up and down (sometimes within a channel).

Of course, the problem with both swing trading and long-term trend trading is that success is based on correctly identifying what type of market is currently being experienced. Trend trading would have been the ideal strategy for the raging bull market of the last half of the 1990s, while swing trading probably would have been best for 2000 and 2001.

The Baseline

Much research on historical data has proven that in a market conducive to swing trading liquid stocks tend to trade above and below a baseline value, which is portrayed on a chart with an exponential moving average (EMA). In his book "Come Into My Trading Room: A Complete Guide To Trading" (2002), Dr. Alexander Elder uses his understanding of a stock's behavior above and below the baseline to describe the swing trader's strategy of 'buying normalcy and selling mania' or 'shorting normalcy and covering depression'. Once the swing trader has used the EMA to identify the typical baseline on the stock chart, he or she goes long at the baseline when the stock is heading up and short at the baseline when the stock is on its way down.

So, swing traders are not looking to hit the home run with a single trade - they are not concerned about perfect timing to buy a stock exactly at its bottom and sell exactly at its top (or vice versa). In a perfect trading environment, they wait for the stock to hit its baseline and confirm its direction before they make their moves. The story gets more complicated when a stronger uptrend or downtrend is at play: the trader may paradoxically go long when the stock jumps below its EMA and wait for the stock to go back up in an uptrend, or he or she may short a stock that has stabbed above the EMA and wait for it to drop if the longer trend is down.