Swinging Changed Everything

There are numerous ways to trade.

There’s long term investing, day trading, position trading, swing trading, and within those verticals there’s common shares, options, and futures.

Each approach attracts a different type of participant because all of them demand a different mindset, time commitment, personality, and risk tolerance.

A long term investor typically focuses on fundamentals, management, balance sheets, and multi year trends. They’re less concerned with daily price fluctuations and more interested in whether a business is growing and performing well over a long period of time. I believe every market participant should have a long term portfolio and it’s always been a core part of how I approach markets.

Regardless of how active you are as a trader, long term investing provides a foundation that operates independently from short term decision making. Trading can be opportunistic and reactive but a long term portfolio is built around patience and consistency. Time itself is one of the most powerful advantages an investor has. Consistently investing in the market compounds over time.

A day trader typically operates inside intraday price action and focuses on shorter timeframes such as the 5 minute, 10 minute, 30 minute, or hourly charts. This requires very quick decision making and near perfect entries.

For a long time I believed day trading was what I was supposed to be doing because it’s what was sold as the quickest way to get rich. It feels active and exciting and many online present it as the way to trade. I hated it.

I found myself glued to the screen for hours and would stress over every wick and every tiny move in price, it was exhausting. Small losses also added up quickly because the frequency of decisions was so high. I was constantly entering and exiting positions and questioning what I was doing.

The reality for me set in and it was simple. My personality didn’t align with that style of trading, and I’d argue it doesn’t align with most peoples personalities.

That led me toward swing and position trading.

Swing and position trading are styles of trading focused on capturing larger price moves over longer periods of time vs. small intraday fluctuations. Typically traders using this approach hold positions for many days, weeks or months. Instead of reacting to every short term move, the focus shifts toward identifying bigger opportunities supported by not just technical setups, but fundamentals, themes, and narratives. Positions can begin as shorter term swings but also evolve into longer position trades if the broader thesis continues to strengthen.

This allows traders to participate in both tactical momentum and larger structural trends at the same time.

That style of trading is what changed everything for me. What immediately stood out was how different the experience felt. I quit chasing quick wins and stopped trying to manage a trade minute by minute or hour by hour, instead I started focusing on identifying big picture opportunities that could unfold over weeks and months.

I did more upfront research on narratives, catalysts, themes, etc. and also found myself less stressed and able to live my life. I didn’t have to be glued to my screens micromanaging trades anymore.

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Swing and position trading allowed me to do less while capturing more. Not just more in the markets, but more in life. Everyone says they want to trade and invest for freedom, but for many that “freedom” is still sitting in front of the computer clicking buttons and trading for 6-12 hours per day. That’s not freedom in my view, that’s still work disguised as freedom.

As a swing and position trader my goal isn’t trying to extract dollars every single day from every single intraday move. I don’t have a “daily dollar goal” like many people do when day trading. That mindset leads to forcing trades. “I need to hit my dollar goal of $1,000 today, I need to find a trade” is some of the most toxic thinking one can have in the market.

My objective is to identify opportunities that have technical, fundamental, and thematic tailwinds on bigger picture timeframes. This leads to less action which can feel boring, but trading isn’t meant to be used as a source of dopamine.

There are days where I make nothing as my swing/position trades work through normal volatility and try to find their footing. That’s part of the process when you operate on larger timeframes. Trades rarely move in a straight line and expecting daily big gains is how you lose sight of the bigger picture.

On the flip side, when my positions do find their footing, the experience is completely different. Big gains happen without me clicking a single button.

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I realized that if I wanted to make real money in the markets, I have to let stocks and setups mature. Micromanaging my trades and obsessing over intraday action was not going to get me where I wanted to be.

That’s one of the biggest mindset shifts that came with swing and position trading. Progress comes from allowing time, patience, research and conviction the chance to do the heavy lifting once I’m positioned. Not from constant activity. Instead of chasing the move, I’m already participating in it without really doing anything. There aren’t many better feelings than being positioned in a stock before a big move supported by your thesis.

In terms of entering swing and position trades, I don’t rely on charts alone. I prefer using a combination of technicals, fundamentals, thematics, and narratives. In my experience, the best trades tend to have alignment across all four.

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When looking at technicals, weekly and monthly support levels can offer some of the most compelling risk to reward opportunities.

Daily charts are often less useful because they tend to magnify short term noise vs. the broader trend. Larger timeframes smooth out the volatility and make it easier to identify true areas of major support and resistance, and longer term trend direction. I’ve found that a level can look insignificant on a daily chart, but at the same time carry plenty of importance when viewed on a weekly or monthly timeframe.

Trading around these higher timeframe levels allows risk to be defined more clearly while positioning for moves that can unfold over weeks or months, rather than days.

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A big key to this style of trading is that trades are often tied to major shifts happening underneath the surface, not just a technical setup on the chart. Examples include technological adoption cycles such as AI, narrative shifts, policy changes like supply chain reshoring, energy transitions, or new product ecosystems. Positions are often held through volatility because the thesis itself is bigger picture.

Technicals + fundamentals + thematics + narrative = golden opportunity.

• Technicals define timing and risk.

• Fundamentals provide confidence and valuation support in the underlying business.

• Thematics explain why capital may flow into a group of stocks.

• Narratives explain why market participants care right now.

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A strong example of a swing + position trade over the last few years has been GEV.

Not only has the stock displayed a very strong technical chart pattern, but the fundamentals, thematics, and narrative all aligned at the same time.

Fundamentally it’s a profitable company growing earnings at a healthy pace while also benefiting from improving margins and strong demand visibility. That creates institutional interest.

In my view, the bigger driver has been the structural shift happening around energy demand. AI has created an entirely new problem for the tech industry, power availability. Data centers require huge amounts of electricity and power. Hyperscalers quickly realized that computing capacity is constrained by energy, not just chips.

Energy has become one of the largest bottlenecks to scaling AI infrastructure.

Tying into that point, the theme and narrative is AI. More specifically the energy buildout and electrification cycle. When you combine those forces with a company executing excellent operationally and a chart that continues to act well, it creates the type of setup swing and position traders look for. And that’s clear with the performance of GEV over the last 20 months, as it’s up 520%.

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That leads to my next point, swing and position trading means you won’t be clicking buying or selling everyday. If you sat in GEV over the last two years, you would have outperformed all hedge funds and “super investors.” Did I or anyone else sit in just GEV over the last 20 months? No, because we all like to make things difficult.

Markets condition people to believe productivity = action, but in swing and position trading productivity actually looks like restraint and patience. Sitting through consolidation and ignoring noise is key. You have to allow your thesis to play out if you still believe in it AND price hasn’t proved you wrong.

Trading and gambling both activate the brain’s reward system via dopamine. This leads to an urges to trade often because our brain wants more. More action, more money, more everything. It’s our job to resist and fight against our instincts.

Many of the best trading days aren’t the ones where you’re busiest or clicking the most buttons. They’re the ones where the work was already done days or weeks earlier and you just reaping the rewards of your previous work.

Holding a position requires sitting through pullbacks and watching unrealized gains shrink at times. This is completely normal. You’ll also find yourself scrolling social media and seeing others day trading or posting massive short term options gains, you have to ignore it and focus on yourself.

It comes with periods where nothing happens and the market feels indifferent to your thesis. Unlike day trading where feedback is immediate and frequent, swing and position trading demand patience without constant validation or invalidation.

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There are plenty of stretches where the best decision is simply to do nothing.

That sounds easy in theory but in practice it can be incredibly difficult. This is because markets and our world constantly tempt participants into action as news flows endlessly and social media amplifies every short term move. Watching others trade actively while you sit and wait can feel counterintuitive.

What’s important to realize is that someone else’s opportunity is not always your opportunity, and your opportunity is not always everyone else’s. There are thousands of stocks to trade. Nobody is going to catch every move. You are competing with yourself, nobody else.

There are a few big questions I ask myself when swing and position trading:

• Where is capital flowing? Which groups are moving together?

• Which industries are benefiting from structural change?

• Was a new product released that could have an impact on a stock, or sector as a whole?

• How are the earnings?

Markets don’t move randomly for long periods of time, if there’s a sustained move it almost always has a reason behind it.

Capturing those sustained moves doesn’t require constant activity but it does require paying attention to what’s going on, and why it’s happening. Swing and position trading requires managing trades, but from a different perspective. You have to stay up not only with the chart, but with the theme, narrative, and fundamentals surrounding the company.

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This style of trading forced me to slow down and focus less on constant activity, but more on identifying the highest quality opportunities. I became less stressed, more patient, far more selective about where I deploy capital, and more free.

Markets will always offer endless opportunities, real growth comes when you realize you don’t need to chase all of them. Oftentimes the biggest edge comes from doing less and allowing time to work in your favor once you’ve positioned correctly.

Swing and position trading unlocked another level of my trading.

And I truly believe it can do the same for you too.