Swing Trading Strategies
Learn to plan, size and manage trades that last several days to a few weeks: scanning for candidates, trading trend, breakout and counter-trend setups, handling earnings and overnight gaps, and reviewing your results with a written playbook.
Self-study course Self-study course: written lessons, videos and downloadable materials for independent learning. There is no supervision, assessment, individual feedback or tutoring. Self-check quizzes are evaluated automatically in your browser — we do not see your results.
All 13 lessons free
Before you start
- Chart basics: candlesticks, support, resistance and trend (covered in the Trading course)
- Position sizing and R-multiples (covered in the Risk Management course)
- Moving averages and ATR (covered in the Technical Analysis course)
What you will be able to do
- Calculate the full cost of a swing trade, including financing, and express it in R
- Build a written scan that filters shares by liquidity and volatility and ranks them by relative strength
- Plan trend-following, breakout-and-retest and counter-trend setups with precise entry, stop and target rules
- Size swing positions with stop, gap-stress and position-value limits and decide in advance how to handle earnings and other events
- Apply exit rules such as time stops, trailing stops and partial exits, and manage several open positions together
- Review swing trades with metrics and a journal, and write a personal swing-trading playbook
Lessons in this course
Swing trading: holding periods, costs and overnight risk
Define swing trading by its holding period, express all trading costs in R, and measure how an overnight gap can turn a planned loss into a larger one.
Scanning for candidates: relative strength and liquidity filters
Build a repeatable scan that removes illiquid and unsuitable shares, then ranks the rest by relative strength against a benchmark.
Trend-following swing setups
Apply a written trend filter, measure pullback depth in ATR and plan an entry trigger, stop and target for a trend-following swing trade.
Breakout-and-retest setups
Confirm a daily breakout with close and volume rules, then compare a breakout entry with a retest entry by risk, reward in R and missed trades.
Counter-trend swing trades and when to avoid them
Measure how stretched a share is from its mean, apply strict conditions and smaller size to counter-trend swings, and recognise the situations where they should not be taken.
Earnings and event risk for swing traders
Find the events inside your holding period, estimate the market's implied move, and choose in advance whether to exit, reduce or hold a swing position through an event.
Sizing swing positions with gaps in mind
Add a gap-stress limit and a position-value cap to normal stop-based sizing, and see why tight stops create large hidden gap exposure.
Exit rules: time stops, trailing stops and partial exits
Write precise swing-trade exit rules and measure how time stops, trailing stops and partial exits change the result in R.
Swing trading with weekly charts
Use the weekly chart to define trend, stops and a once-a-week routine, and compare weekly and daily stop distances with numbers.
Sector rotation for swing traders
Rank sectors by relative strength over two lookback periods and use the ranking to focus your swing-trading scans.
Managing several swing positions at once
Set limits for total risk, sector risk and capital use, and stress-test a book of open swing trades against a market-wide gap.
Reviewing swing trades: metrics and journaling
Add MAE, MFE, exit efficiency, holding time and setup tags to your journal and read a small sample without over-interpreting it.
Your written swing-trading playbook
Combine scanning, setups, sizing, exits, portfolio limits, routines and review rules into one written swing-trading playbook with exact numbers.
Systematic Trading & Backtesting
Continue with the course "Systematic Trading & Backtesting" to turn your swing-trading rules into precise, testable systems and check them on historical data.
View course outline