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.
If you’re wondering how swing trading works, here are the nuts and bolts…
Swing trading is an active approach that profits from short-term stock moves. The process goes like this:
- Identify the stocks that are likely to move soon.
- Enter a position.
- Wait for the stock to rebound to its “primary trend.”
- Sell your position two to 30 days later to lock in your gains.
Pretty straightforward, right?
This approach allows you to make money no matter what the overall stock market is doing.
Quant Investing at Your Fingertips: Oxford Swing Trader
Oxford Swing Trader is my VIP Trading Research Service at The Oxford Club. My system uses swing trading algorithms similar to those used by some of the world’s top hedge funds.
Let’s take a closer look at a recent Oxford Swing Trader recommendation…
On June 3, I recommended Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX) stock and the October 15 $125 call options.
I wrote at the time that a handful of Oxford Swing Trader algorithms had identified the stock’s 10.69% pullback from its recent high of $142.80 on May 10 as a terrific swing trade opportunity.
What happened next?
Well, the stock consolidated for about two weeks and then resumed its upward primary trend… just as our trading algorithms had predicted.
On June 30 – just 19 trading days after my initial recommendation – I sent an alert to my subscribers, telling them to book profits on the October 15 $125 calls, which were up 29%.
Now let’s pop the hood and take a closer look at how Oxford Swing Trader works…
Having to page through more than 4,000 stock charts to find swing trading opportunities like this one would take me several hours each day.
Luckily, computers have made the work a lot easier.
That’s because the Oxford Swing Trader quantitative system translates technical chart patterns into an objective numeric formula.
Each day after the market close, I download the closing prices of 4,000-plus stocks to a powerful computer dedicated exclusively to this task.
I then run the stocks through a set of algorithms that identifies the ones that fit a specific set of swing trading patterns.
By running a series of processes, I can identify swing trade candidates in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours.
Once I’ve found an ideal swing trade, I send an alert to my Oxford Swing Trader subscribers recommending the stock along with a price target, a stop price and, whenever possible, an options play to turbocharge their returns.
My final decision is always based solely on the numbers. But I will also include my expert research and analysis with each stock.
I recommend an average of two swing trades – like Quest Diagnostics – each week in Oxford Swing Trader.
That’s about 100 opportunities a year to generate quick swing trading gains.
If you want to learn more about Oxford Swing Trader, listen to this conversation I recently had with Russell B., a happy subscriber.
Good investing,
Nicholas
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