Topic
Swing Trading
Holding for days to weeks means living through closes, gaps, weekends and earnings dates. These pages deal with each of them.
A swing trade spends most of its life with the market closed. That is why the questions here keep returning to the overnight gap, the weekend and the earnings date: the stop you set during the session does not protect you while the stock cannot trade.
Start with where the stop goes and how the position is sized from it, then read the pieces on earnings dates and the weekend before your next hold.
Analysis
- Holding Stocks Over the Weekend Is a Position Sizing Decision
The risk of holding a swing trade over the weekend is set by position size on Friday, since a stop cannot fill at a price the stock gaps past.
- Multiple Timeframe Analysis: Let the Weekly Chart Veto Daily Setups
A daily swing setup that runs into a weekly downtrend or weekly resistance is a lower-quality trade, and most of them are worth skipping.
- Swing Trading Earnings: Plan Every Trade Around the Next Report
Look up the next earnings date before every swing entry and decide then whether to exit first or hold with a size built for the gap.
- Time Stop: A Swing Trade Needs One as Well as a Price Stop
Most swing trades should carry a time stop matched to the setup's own timeframe, written down at entry next to the price stop.
Explainers
Glossary
- Inside bar
A price bar whose high is below the previous bar's high and whose low is above the previous bar's low, so its whole range sits inside the bar before it.
- Pullback
A temporary move against the prevailing trend that leaves the trend's structure of swing highs and swing lows intact.
- R-multiple
A trade's profit or loss divided by its initial risk per share, where initial risk is the distance from entry to the planned stop.
- Swing high and swing low
A swing high is a bar whose high is above the highs of the bars on either side of it; a swing low is a bar whose low is below the lows on either side.
Calculators
- Swing Trade Risk Calculator
Shares from your risk and stop, the reward-to-risk in R, and the win rate the trade needs to break even.