What’s Your Trading Style

If you’re serious about getting into investing, you might as well figure out what your trading style should honestly be? This is something that you have to figure out for one reason: everything else comes after it. For example, if you give in to day trading, then you have to figure out your schedule. Day trading is hard because there’s a lot of movements in the market within the day (intra-day), and it’s not for everyone. As a busy woman, you’re probably not going to want to get into that at all. It would make a lot more sense if you could switch things up and look at other styles that would still let you have a life while becoming a savvy investor.

You can also swing trade, which is basically going to be where you look at a security and purchase it. The holding period is usually a few days to a few weeks. Long term investing would be holding onto it for months or even years before you sell — if you sell at all. Some long term positions are held so tightly that you really don’t sell out at all. You just cling to the stock. In the case of companies like Berkshire Hathaway or Vodafone, this is definitely a good thing.

The downside to long term investing (really, anything that isn’t day trading) is that you have to make sure that you are understanding your losses. Once the market closes, you can’t change your position. So if something comes over the financial news wire and causes a panic, you’re stuck dealing with the fallout. However, day trading is such that you have to be glued to a display to make sure that you’re taking advantage of all of the price changes.

You’ll be dealing with the sentiment in the market more than anything else. If people feel like they’re being threatened, then they will back out and if they feel like they can make a profit, they’ll surge in. Sometimes you can manipulate this to your own benefit, but true market timing is very hard to do like everyone else, you’ll be making your best guess as well.

There’s a lot of things that you really need to focus on in order to make things happen, investing is one of those things that will require your top concentration — no matter what trading style you pick. You can also move between trading styles, but you will have to learn how to shift gears over time. This is where further research is definitely a must. Good luck!