The secret to trading is often thought to be more a function of a time frame rather than a function of skill. In much the same way that university students and alumni promote and defend their alma mater, come hell or high water, so do proponents of the different schools of trading. With somewhat of a fanatical zeal, traders will tout the benefits of being a day, position, or swing trader with little regard to whether any of these types of trading may actually work for you.
One trader will say going home flat is the only way to trade; another trader will say that the trend is your friend. Who’s to say either is 100 percent right? As with many things in life, success in trading is not cut and dry. If it were, everyone who attends a trading seminar or reads a trading book would be able to emulate the success of the speaker or author immediately. Each trader has to find his own path to success, using the information that he acquires along the way.
George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Richard Dennis are each successful in their own right. George Soros founded the Quantum Fund with the express purpose of speculating. Much of his trading revolved around short-term and opportunistic currency moves, long before he established his non-profit company. Warren Buffett took a different approach. Known as a value investor, Warren Buffett’s buy and hold strategy turned many of his shareholders into multi-millionaires. Richard Dennis, on the other hand, used commodity options as a way to trade himself to wealth.
All of these men are considered professional traders, yet each has his own way of doing things, his own strategy for protecting himself from loss, and his own variety of success in trading the markets. It’s a lot like professional sports. In professional sports there are no two players that are just alike. You can point to two athletes in the same sport, with similar size, strength, speed, training, and ability. While both are professional athletes and can become members of the hall-of-fame, it could be for entirely different reasons.
Everyone likes to believe that there are only three common types of traders—day, swing, and position traders—and there are advantages and disadvantages to each. Your lifestyle may dictate what is best for you, but to be fair the question has to be asked "Is a trader that is solely fixated on time approaching the markets realistically?" If a set trading time frame is eliminated from the equation then any trader can be freed to pursue the essential components of the trade. That's when you become the fourth and little discussed type of trader, a specialist.
To be this fourth type of trader you must take the necessary steps to lay the foundation around your own personal choices. Specialists approach the market and utilize strategies that are solely best for them, regardless of the time frame. By customizing their approach it helps clarify how they operate in the markets.
By focusing only three vital pieces of information: entry target, loss target, and profit target numbers specialist open themselves up to real opportunities. With these three bits of information it quickly becomes irrelevant whether or not you day trade, swing trade, or position trade. You are following the rhythms of the market and the time frame can be anything. A specialist is looking for trade setups that are buried deep inside trends and counter-trends of the actual market not based on some artificial time frames. This is a huge benefit and allows you the chance to exploit the natural daisy chain of the cash, futures, and options market.
Without a question your goal as a novice or experienced non-professional trader is not to choose between time frames but to specialize. It is always preferable to trade what is happening in the markets, not what you wish to happen. By following the natural ebbs and flows you become flexible thereby increasing your chances for success. Some days the market will make you a day trader, other days you will be a swing trader, and sometimes you will find it smart to take a position. These "time frames" will occur naturally, they won't be forced because you are trading with the markets rhythm as a specialist. This approach to the market can be purely liberating.
