The SharePlanner Swing Trading Group & Thoughts On Trading This market

Note: I wanted to put this post on the front page and let you all know (or remind) that we have some excellent trading groups on SharePlanner that you can join for free (or even start your own). Below is the latest post from the Swing-Trading Group:

While i lost about 0.3% of my portfolio in the market today (not much at all), I came away from it feeling very irritated. Yesterday’s huge sell-off looked perfect in my opinion, and gave every sign that today would be more of the same, but, boy, was I wrong.

Apparently there was a successful EU meeting or whatever and the market responded in a favorable manner.

But as most of you know, swing-trading is not nearly as easy as it used to be. Not since the beginning of 2008. It doesn’t matter how disciplined or risk adverse you are, it will give you a good shalacking if you hold positions over night on a regular basis.

As a result I’ve been day-trading a lot lately, and been doing it with a lot of success (2 years ago, I would’ve never have given day-trading a second thought).

But this week actually, and last week as well, I found myself swing-trading a little bit more.

So far it hasn’t been for waste either – I’ve actually accrued some nice gains in doing so. Mainly with TNA, TZA, DUG, UPRO, and SCO. But what I have found is that these trades work best when the market is at opposite extreme levels (oversold/overbought), against support resistance, and has multiple technical factors going its way on various time frames. Just swing-trading long because the market is going up, or swing-trading short because the market is going down, will suck your capital away faster than anything you can imagine.

As for profit taking, I find it is best to scale out on strength (preferred) or sell out altogether on strength (which is what I do more times than not).

Raising stops can be frustrating especially if they are 3 or 4% from the current trading price, because it doesn’t take much for stocks of any kind to make those kinds of moves anymore and stop you out.

As a result, continue being very careful with what you determine to be good stocks for holding overnight and more so over the weekend. There is a lot of news, news-less rumors, and rumors of rumors, that send the market risking/falling with absolutely no warning at all.

All the best to you.