Stock Market swing trading is the next best thing to day-trading. It is one way to get your blood running fast, and your adrenalin jumping way off the charts and the closest you can come to day-trading.

Traditional Trading

For many stock market players, traditional trading is simply to buy a chunk of stocks and holding on to them for dear life. Daily checking is not the norm. The investor will check on the stock more like a mother hen checks her eggs, which is very seldom. The only times the investor who buys stocks long term does look at them is when the statement from the brokerage firm comes in, if at all. For the swing stock market trader, the situation is a lot more different.

Day-Trading

For a day-trader of stocks, the process is simple. You turn on your computer, and three or four massive display screens. Then you access the different exchanges if you are working with more than one, or you bring up the exchange you want to monitor. From there, you bring up screens for different investments. These could be indexes, single stocks, or industries. From that point until the market shuts down, the day-trader will stay glued to the screens to check for ups and downs on the different investments. The money is made whether or not investments go up or down. The day-trader can and does trade on minute changes on the investments. If a stock goes up by 50 cents, and the day-trader has thousands of shares invested in it, that will be thousands of shares times the 50 cents that he will have profited if he is able to catch that move before it corrects itself. If the investor isn’t paying attention to this move then he looses out on it. For the swing trader this process is not so intense.

Swing Trader

The swing trader starts by researching the stocks or indexes he wants to invest in. Are these stocks showing some sort of volatility, do they go up and down on a regular basis, do they swing up and down enough to justify working with these investments to bring in some profit? These are all questions that go through the swing trader before he starts investing in the stock.

Swing Trading Routines

A typical week for the swing stock market trader could be something like, Monday: Research an industry; Tuesday, research three or four stocks from that industry that look promising; Wednesday: concentrate focus on one or two stocks; Thursday: do some paper runs before investing; Friday: check results and review process to make sure things are still ok. Next week, Monday: fire up the broker account with direct access to the stock market trading; Tuesday: use some funds to invest on one of the stocks researched before, use stop-losses triggers. Wednesday: review market results. If stopped out, start again with a different stock. Thursday: review how the market is doing. Research additional stocks/industries. Wednesday: invest on a different stock. Keep track of what stocks are doing from time to time. Don’t forget stop-losses. Thursday:keep track of investment and research industry.Friday: either close out of the stocks or let the run ride its course.

Although swing stock market trading is a little more laid-back, there is still the need to keep track of what the investment is doing. There are some ways to do this now that makes it easy for someone to invest and not have to stay in front of a monitor all day long. One way is to have a smart phone that allows you to receive market information that is close to being live — usually delayed by 15 minutes. Another is to have a portable computer with direct access to the internet, which allows you to view the details a lot quicker. Either option is not very expensive when you consider what is at stake.

Swing market trading is simple but can be very addicting. Being able to access market data as it happens and being able to use it to make a few dollars is exciting and can get you hooked in no time.

There is more to swing market trading than the very simplistic way I presented here, obviously. If this information raises your interest make sure you check into this.

Resources

There are a few places to get information on swing stock market trading and I will be updating this with some of the ones I would feel comfortable recommending.

One of these is Mr Swing and make sure you get his free ebook on swing trading.