Three Steps To Successful Swing Trading

Nothing comes easily in life, you have to work hard, work smart and be consistent to be successful. Swing trading is no different. Every year hundreds of people join swing trading, a majority of them lose money and quit for good. These are the people who complain about everything that’s wrong or unfair in this world. Successful people on the other hand are different, they work hard, they work smart, they work consistently until success is achieved. If you are one of them, here are the three steps to successful swing trading.

Knowledge is wisdom, knowledge is power and knowledge is our first step to becoming a successful swing trader. If you want to become a professional swing trader, if you want to make living swing trading, and be successful at it, you have to gain knowledge about swing trading. Reading, reading and more reading, Yes! that’s your first step to becoming a successful swing trader. Visit online forums, attend chat rooms, subscribe to good swing trading blogs, read books and lots of books. Once someone asked me how many books I have to read before I am ready to swing trade, well my answer was to read as many books as you have to, until you get the clear picture of how swing trading works. Again, the important thing here is to read books specifically written for swing traders. There are literally hundreds of books about swing trading, here are few that’s worth reading.

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Getting Started With Fundamental Analysis
The Illustrated Guide To Technical Analysis Signals And Phrases
Candlestick Charting For Dummies
The Master Swing Trader

You can learn all you want, but if you don’t practice what you learned, simply you won’t succeed. That brings us to our second step, gain experience. How do you gain experience without actually swing trading stocks? Well, you don’t. You have to swing trade stocks on actual swing trading platform with real hard earned money in order to gain real experience. Don’t expect to gain experience over night, you have to take baby steps. The first step of gaining experience is to start with virtual trading with paper money. The problem with this type of trading is it lacks fear, greed and uncertainty that is attached with real money. You can learn everything about swing trading with virtual money except how to handle emotions, which you will learn in the next step when you start trading with real money. Here are some of the virtual trading platforms that you can use to practice, almost all of them are free.

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Updown.com Earn Real Money Beating S&P, Free Practice Account
etoro.com Get Free Forex Practice Account

You gained the knowledge, you know how swing trading works, you know how to read charts, you practiced on virtual platform. That brings us to our third step, learning to control your emotions and limit your losses . In order to trade with real money you have to open up a real money account with a direct access broker, here is the link to the one I use.

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LightSpeed.com

The important thing to remember when you first start swing trading is to keep you trades small, never trade more than 100 shares per trade and no more than 2 trades a week. Remember you are still practicing and you just graduated from virtual trading to real money trading. When you lose money on a trade, sit back and think how you feel, try to shake the losses off and not go after the same trade to make up for the loss, believe me you will never if you are depressed. Just walk away for a few hours or a few days and get back to it again. Losing brings you one step closer to winning, learn from your mistakes and try avoid it next time. “Practice makes a man perfect” post this in bold letters on the wall in front of you. Finally, I hope you have good luck and a safe and happy trading!