How To Swing Trade

Archive for February, 2010

I am new to the stock market and going to do some swing trading. The idea is to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. But this makes me wonder: why would anyone buy from you when it is at the top of a peak and sell to you when it is at the bottom. Will my orders be successful or not?

Because a lot of new investors buy and sell based on emotion, not reason. They think what has happened in the recent past will continue. They see a stock price rise, and without looking at the fundamentals, financial facts (very high price to earnings, sales, book, etc ratios), their emotions say "I missed some of this great rise, and don’t want to miss the rest, I better buy now.
Same with the bottom. This thing has been falling for 6 months. I should have sold at least 3 or 4 months ago when the price was higher. I don’t want to get wiped out. I better sell now.

Is there an efficient tool to measure my trading performance vs an index? Maybe a website that can graph such information automatically etc? Unfortunately my broker does not have this option, thus I am looking for other possible solutions.

You can probably download your trades from your broker into Excel.

You can get the index info here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5EDJI

On the left sidebar, click on Historical Prices, and at the bottom of the page click on Download to Spreadsheet
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EDJI

Let’s get real, it, having been used by Hedge Funds and large conglomerate CEOs and other inside officers has enticed too much corruption and is sucking the US Dollar value dry! If you think a stock is going down, sell it….simple as that and make the big boys do that too! No more of this cooperative bouncing the stock between option strike prices to suck the capital out of hard working American’s retirement savings! Lets get the common back in the stock market!

No. Actually the system works great. People who work hard to understand the system can make some extra money and retire early. Others, who want to jump in and expect to get rich without any effort get what they deserve, too.

How big does an intraday swing in trading (primarily Forex) have to be (as a guide). I heard 25+ pips on the m5 is okay? Can anyone elaborate please? I am looking to pick high/lows and retrace areas.

If you are new to FX start small. On a full contract 25 pips is $250. On a mini lot it’s $25. I can limit my downside to about $15 includin the spread which is why people saying Fx is risky is just plain wrong. Try to limit like that on stocks, options, or futues. Your trading style will determine your risk tolerence , timeframe, lot size,

Just curious if anyone know what a fair rate would be?

Thanks in advance

That is an extremely small account to pay someone else to manage. (Small is $100,000 to $500,000). You are not likely to get anyone good or cheap.

It is difficult to defend accounts on a cost basis if they aren’t generating at least $1200 per year in income unless you have thousands of them…so my educated guess is at least 5% per year.

The industry "standard" for basic management is 2% per year for accounts under $1 million and 1% per year for accounts over $1 million. The highest fees on the biggest accounts can be as much as 2% per year plus 20% of profits for the top managers.

Of course if you give up the idea of active management and trading and go with index funds and passive management, you can lower your annual expenses to far less than 1% per year with little net change in average annual return.