Why I think swing trading is the toughest, even though it's supposed to be 'just waiting'

When I was day trading, people around me often said, ‘It must be nice that swing trading seems easier.’ You don’t need to be glued to the screen all day, and you don’t need to use up all your concentration in the first few minutes of the market opening. It is true that in terms of time commitment, swing trading is overwhelmingly freer.

However, once I started swing trading in earnest, I realized that this is not an ‘easy method,’ but rather a ‘method with a different kind of difficulty.’ Today, I would like to write about why I feel swing trading is difficult and what I think about it.

It’s hard to learn because results don’t come immediately

In day trading, you get an answer within the day. By the evening, you know whether today’s decision was good or bad. Because of this immediate feedback, you can polish your intuition while repeating failures and successes at high speed.

In swing trading, it takes days or weeks to see results. You receive the answer to whether today’s decision was correct much later. I feel that this ‘slowness of feedback’ is the biggest reason why swing trading is difficult. Because it takes time to check the results, it simply takes many times longer than day trading to learn from the same number of failures.

Daily life interferes with decision-making

Day trading is done by concentrating on a limited time around the market opening, so it can be separated relatively cleanly from work and daily life. However, in swing trading, seeds of judgment constantly creep into your daily life during the days or weeks you hold a position.

Unrealized losses that cross your mind during work meetings, notifications from stock apps you check while dining with friends, nights when you think about ‘what will happen tomorrow’ before going to sleep. I realized only after trying it that the difficulty of swing trading lies not in the time you spend sitting in front of the chart, but in the time you spend away from it.

The act of ‘waiting’ itself is actually the most burdensome

People tend to feel a higher mental burden when they are just waiting in a state where no conclusion has been reached than when they are concentrating on something. Day trading is a specialized burden of ‘concentrating on this very moment,’ and once it’s over, there is a clear break. Swing trading is a slowly continuing burden of ‘carrying uncertainty about when it will end into your daily life.’

If you start swing trading without understanding this difference in the type of burden, under the assumption that it ‘should be easier than day trading,’ you will be confused by a type of fatigue you didn’t expect. I myself was caught in this very trap in the beginning.

Resilience is tested before technique

When you read articles about swing trading, they tend to focus on technical topics such as technical analysis and money management. Of course, those are important, but what I feel after actually continuing to trade is that before technique, something like resilience—’how much can you stay calm during a time when there is no answer’—is tested first.

No matter how excellent your decision-making criteria are, if you collapse because you cannot endure the period of unrealized losses, you cannot utilize those criteria. Conversely, I even think that ‘getting used to waiting’ has a greater impact on performance than improving the accuracy of technicals.

If you know the true nature of the difficulty, you can deal with it

I believe that all the ‘difficulties’ I have written about so far are not things to be overcome by willpower, but things that can be dealt with by systems. If feedback is slow, you should make the process (whether you followed the rules) the axis of evaluation instead of the results. If judgments interfere with daily life, you should decide in advance how often you will look at stock prices. Resilience to waiting can only be cultivated through the accumulation of experience, but at least just knowing ‘why I feel tired now’ changes how you face that tiredness.

A week when I felt the difficulty

Previously, there was a week I spent where a stock related to a certain theme did not move as expected after I entered it. A state continued where it just went back and forth between unrealized gains and unrealized losses, and no sense of direction emerged at all.

That week, my concentration was somewhat scattered during work, and at night I couldn’t fall asleep easily, thinking, ‘Which way will it move tomorrow?’ When I was doing day trading, I almost never experienced this ‘state where there is no answer.’ That was because a conclusion was always reached within the day. Through this week, I realized once again that the difficulty of swing trading is not the difficulty of technicals, but a completely different kind of difficulty: enduring a time when there is no answer.

In the end, that stock did not reach the stop-loss line I had anticipated, and eventually returned to near the target price, allowing me to take profit according to the original plan. If I hadn’t been able to endure the anxiety of that week and had thrown in the towel halfway through, I would never have achieved this result. Because I understood the true nature of the difficulty, I was able to distinguish and think, ‘What I am feeling now is anxiety about uncertainty, not that the trade itself is failing.’

The respective difficulties of day trading and swing trading

I don’t believe that either day trading or swing trading is ‘easier’ than the other. Day trading has the difficulty of requiring instant reflexes and concentration, while swing trading has the difficulty of requiring endurance and resilience. They are just different types of challenges, and neither is a simple method.

That is precisely why, if you choose swing trading just because you think it’s ‘easier than day trading,’ you will be surprised by the unexpected burden. Conversely, if you start with prior knowledge of the difficulties described in this article, you should be able to avoid being unnecessarily swayed by the stress you feel while in the thick of it.

Swing trading is a more difficult method than you might think. However, I feel that the nature of this difficulty is not about talent, but in many cases, it is the kind of thing that can be compensated for with a system.

*This article shares my own personal way of thinking and criteria for judgment based on my experience, and it does not recommend the buying or selling of any specific stocks. All stock examples in this article are fictional. Please make final investment decisions at your own risk.