A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on how an army of "meme" stock traders minted fortunes. Yet if you look at the overall stock market, you come to a far less exciting conclusion. Yes, the U.S. stock market closed at a record high last week. But between May 7 and last week's close, the S&P 500 rose a paltry 3.8%. In short, if you are a buy-and-hold investor, your portfolio has probably gone nowhere over the past two months. So if you want to make money in the markets, short-term trading is the only viable option. Alas, traditional short-term trading has its downsides. In most cases, it means sitting glued to a computer screen all day... tracking every zig and zag of the market as though it's a nonstop, real-life video game. Surely most of us have better things to do on a sunny summer day. That's where swing trading comes in. Swing trading is a low-maintenance approach to wringing short-term profits out of the stock market. And you don't have to be chained to your computer or stooped over your smartphone to take advantage of it. In fact, swing trading should take you no more than 10 minutes a week. Just look at the kind of profits my Oxford Swing Trader investment research service has generated in just the last few weeks. A Quick Primer on Swing Trading You may not know much about swing trading... But the world's smartest hedge fund managers have built billion-dollar fortunes using swing trading principles. Paul Tudor Jones II is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. He is No. 108 on the Forbes 400, with a net worth of $7 billion. How did Jones accumulate his considerable fortune? He did it primarily by generating profits in the stock market from short-term swing trading. As Jones puts it, "I have always been a swing trader, meaning that I believe the very best money is to be made at the market turns." And he isn't alone. Mathematics professor Jim Simons founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982. He ranks No. 23 on the Forbes 400 with a net worth of $24.6 billion. From 1988 through 2018, Simons' Medallion Fund generated average annual returns of 66% before fees. Bloomberg has called Simons' quant system "a money printing press." But Simons experienced extraordinary success only after he began to focus on identifying reliable and repeatable short-term patterns in the market in 1990. Today, he works with an army of rocket scientists who spend their lives mining reams of data going back to the 1700s to pick stocks. For the Medallion Fund, the average holding period is two days. That means that Simons, the most successful investor in history, is a swing trader. The good news is that, thanks to the explosion in computing power, you can replicate Jones' and Simons' swing trading successes in your own portfolio. |
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