 Everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Armal with The Stock Swooshing Today. I wanted to talk to you about the difference between active day trading and swing trading. And again, looking here at the overall market, the market's in an uptrend. The market's been in an uptrend for quite some time. I will tell you that most of the life of the market, it is in an uptrend. Now there are times where the market falls off or breaks and sells off, but there's times rarely, rarely ever last that long. There are times where the market is sideways. We saw that in the last week or so over the holiday where the market was sideways. But again, if you're someone that wants to do swing trading, swing trading is more longer term investing or where you're taking a trading, you're holding it for a much larger move. You're not really in and out and pulling cash out of the market on a consistent or regular daily or even weekly basis if you're swing trading. I know people say they are swing trading if they buy something on a Monday and sell it on a Tuesday. It's not really what I would consider swing trading. And the only way you're going to make a lot of money doing that is if you actually get something in a gap. For example, if you'd shorted the market yesterday when it gap down today, you could have said, well, I swing traded that and you could have made money. Again, that's something that doesn't happen all the time. And you would never be able to predict where the market would gap in any regular day or a stock for that matter. I'm not predicting gaps. I'm predicting where the stock of the market's going to go after I see the gap. But getting back to the point of the video where I wanted to just blow up this chart here in the market, what I want to talk about swing trading versus active investing. Here's the market. This is pretty much actually to go back to where we started to really rally here. It was November. In November, the market started to break out, continued higher, rallied, made new highs and we kept going. So if you're someone that just buys every dip or trend trades the market, for example, you say, well, I'm swing trading. I bought the market in November and I'm still in it or whatever the case may be. You're not actively booking money. So yeah, again, swing trading is longer term investing where you're buying something and holding it or shorting something and holding it for a larger move. You're not pulling money out of the market and grabbing money out of the market daily or weekly. What I do is active trading where I'm pulling money or looking to pull money every day in an option or every day in a day trade out of the market active. That is what I call day trade. And you could you could say the same thing with options. Because again, I'm doing the weekly options, which are fast trades to me. Sometimes I will get in and out the same day. Sometimes I will get in one day out the next day. Some days I will get in an option and I will hold it for a week, but that's still fast. And again, not what swing trading is. So active trading is what I do where I'm looking for income generation where you're looking to pull money out of the market on a consistent and regular basis, whether it's daily or weekly. That is not swing trading. People that want to swing trade this market may be having success. Not all the time, but maybe having success. Something because the market has been rallying, but they're not actively making money because really they're not pulling money out of the market on a regular basis, unless you're scalping. You know, like I said the example where if you'd shorted the market yesterday and get out of it today, that would have been a crazy thing to do though. You would not have known the market would gap down today. And on top of that, I mean, you might have guessed that it was, but it was there was no way to predict that for sure. Or with any high level of confidence or conviction. And now to that today we're rallying back again. So again, you wouldn't really want to be short this market right now. Why? The market's strong. So in times where the market is power trending up, power trending, which is not what we're doing now. Haven't done it all this year in 2024. Okay. Didn't do in 2023. But if you're in a power trend in the market to the upside, which the last year we did that was 2021, I guess. I'm going to go back here. I think it was 2021. It was after COVID. Yeah. It was 2021. It was last year the market really power trended up. If you get a power trend market, that's one it's easy to swing trade or stock that's power trending. Navinia did that earlier this year, actually. It's very rare for something to power trend. Again, the market or stocks, or you could have something power trending down. We had a lot of stocks that did that during COVID. But it's rare for anything to power trend up or down. It will not last. And again, if you're trend trading, you're going to have a difficult time trend trading this market, even though it's an up trend, or trend trading any stock, again, unless it's power trending, again, same thing up or down. So people say, well, it's easier to swing trade. No, it's not. It is not easier to swing trade. I'm not saying it's harder to swing trade. I'm just saying it's not easier to swing trade either way, because you still have to get the direction right. You still have to get the time you write. And with swing trading, you have to wait a long time, or much, much longer than with active trading, day trades and options. Swing trading is only easy when you're in something that's power trending. But it's easy if you do a day trader, an option is something that's power trending too. So again, swing trading isn't easier than day trading. Swing trading isn't easier than trading options. Personally, I find day trading to be easier than any other type of trading. Why? Because it's much, much, much, much, much, much easier to predict where somebody's going to go in a short time frame than a long time frame. For example, you said to me, Melissa, today's April 2nd, the QQQs by June 1st are going to be, and I'm just making up a number here. I'm just totally making up at 4.65. I would say, well, how do you know that's going to happen? You have no idea that's going to happen. Or what if you thought it was going to fall? You said, between now and June 1st, QQQ is going to be at 400. You wouldn't know that either. You'd be just throwing darts at a board to say that. But if you said to me, Melissa, let me just pull up the one minute, well, it's almost, well, no, it is 4 o'clock here. Just close. I'm just going to kind of go back because the market's closed, you know, and you realize it was after 4. But anyways, if we were here and this was half an hour, 45 minutes left in the day, I could have said, well, the QQQs are going to go to 4.4, the 50, OK, they're going to go 50 cents, 60 cents, between now and 4 o'clock. That would have been easy to predict. I could have predicted it correctly. I would have. It would have worked. You could have went long it and done it. Do you see what I'm saying? So it's much, much easier to predict where somebody's going to go in five minutes or 10 minutes from now, or one minute from now, or an hour from now, or half an hour from now, or a day from now, then three weeks out, two months out, like you would need to do in order to have profitable swing trades. Because, again, when you're doing a swing trade, you're not doing a swing trade on margin unless you should be on cash on a swing trade if you're holding it overnight, or if you're on it, you're on 2 to 1 margin, which is extremely risky. And so, therefore, you need to size yourself back. But either way, you need extreme moves, or, again, to have a power trend to make money swing trading. So, personally, I find day trading easier than swing trading because you're looking at shorter time frames to predict. Okay? And, again, people are saying, oh, it's easier to swing trade. No, it's not. People that are saying that are just saying that because they have a hard time taking a fast trade. Get over it is what I say to you. You're missing out on opportunity if you're not doing a fast trade, and if you just can't mentally get over it or pressing the buttons or doing a fast trade, then do options. Because you can get in an option and you can hold it for a day or two or a week. And that's still faster, a lot faster than a swing trade and not as fast as a day trade, which I love, which I love personally. But, again, people say, oh, I can't. This is too fast for me. Get over it because you're missing out on opportunities. And swing trading isn't easier than day trading. And it's a lack of a lot less profitable. Again, if something power trends, that's all well and good like we saw in the video do. It will not last. And then what are you gonna do? I can tell right now the emails I'm getting, the questions I'm getting. These are all from people that are not students of mine. These are people that are emailing me and inquiring about the class and asking questions. I can tell that in the last two months, people are losing money trading. This is retail traders, traders are losing money, trading right now. They're having a tough time in this market. Again, we've sort of been range bound for the last six weeks or so. Really the last two weeks, but really going back here since the beginning of March, we've been range bound even a little bit before that. People are having a tough time because they wanna go along, the market's been strong, they've been going long, it did work for a time. And again, you can't really short this market, it's not getting traction at the downside, you see this here today. So again, if you're looking to predict where somebody's gonna go very quick as a day trade, it's so much easier if you know how to do it, if you know how to have a system to do it and a strategy, which I do, which is my rating system, that's another topic for a different day. But I'm just saying, doing fast trades is a heck of a lot easier than doing swing trades, holding, buying and holding. You also are actively generating income when you're doing fast trades on a daily or weekly basis. Swing trading is not that, you must wait for a large move to occur. And again, people are probably along this market here today thinking it's gonna gap up tomorrow. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. There's nothing to indicate here that that will happen. The market can close green and it doesn't mean it's gonna gap up the next day and vice versa. So my point of today's lecture is, I know that retail traders are getting killed right now swing trading. I know that they're doing it and I know people that are trying to do futures or read the market and predict it. I know they're getting killed too. The market's been in such a range. It's been tight trading. I look for specific things to do and yes, I'll trade the market. I did not trade the market today and I have no interest in trading this market right now until it does something that makes me feel interested in doing it, whether long or short. And if you're somebody that's been on the fence about day trading, thinking that you can't do fast trades and you don't know if you can handle it, get over it, learn how to do it and do it because you're missing out on opportunities to make money if you're not doing the fast, quick trades. It's a lot easier to predict where somebody's gonna go in a short timeframe than a long timeframe and you can generate more income doing that by getting in and out a million times in the course of a month than taking one trade or two trades and waiting for it to go. And again, we're not in a power trend market and we're not gonna be this year. We're not gonna power trend down this year. That's not gonna happen. I would, unless for some reason, God forbid they'd raise rates this year, which we're not talking about. That would be the only thing of a crashless market probably. And we're not gonna power trend up. We're just not. There's no reason for that to happen either. So I think this is gonna be a sideways slash neutral slash bullish sideways market for some period of time here. It could last for a couple of months. And so if you don't have a way to make money in the market, a set strategy that you need to actively generate income, if you're just buying and holding or buying dips or waiting for things to go, you're gonna be waiting forever, you're gonna be killing yourself or losing and downing trades like if you were long here this market yesterday, you were down today. So I would be very, very careful in this market. It is chop, it is absolutely chop when we're looking for specific needs to do. That's what I do every day. So if you're interested in learning a strategy to do fast day trades, even if you think you can't do it, you can do it because you can learn how to do it and you get used to doing it and it's a structure and it's a format. And once you start making money doing it, then you'll get realized that it's not that hard. It's just people don't know what to do and they don't know what stocks to focus on. But think about it again, just very, very common sense wise. It makes a lot of sense. We think about the fact that it's so easy to predict where something's gonna go in a short timeframe and a long timeframe. And again, it's better to make money every day than it is to wait for a trade to go for months or weeks or years, which people do with swing trades. Because again, something like NVIDIA, if you'd bought NVIDIA like at the end of last year, beginning of last year, that just, this is just so rare. I mean, I'm just gonna go back here to point this out so I was looking at this the other day because in January, actually, no, we're just talking about this during the class. Yeah, we're talking about this because it's just a silliness now. You could have literally bought NVIDIA. It's just crazy. At the beginning of the year in the 400s, and then it went up and it doubled and it almost hit 1,000. I mean, that's just so rare. It just almost never happens. And I'm not saying it won't happen again this year with this stock or something else, but it's just really rare and you can't wait for opportunities like that to happen every day because you're gonna be waiting forever. Anyways, think about what I said today. Email me at melissathestockswish.com if you're interested in learning a day trading method. Whether it's options or day trades, a fast method to trade and actively consistently pull money out of the market. Again, swing trading, you're waiting a long time for things to go. It's not an easier way to trade. I think actually fast trades are easier. I explained why in this lecture today. If you have questions, email me. Have a great day, everyone.