Successful traders have said over and over again that the surest way to success is to trade a time frame that fits your personality best. There are three major time frames that can be summarized as day trading, swing trading and position trading. In order to help you decide which is best for you we will now take a look at an overview of each.

Day trading or intraday trading are quick trades that often last anywhere from minutes to hours and take place within the same trading day. Day trading is also known as scalping and trades are very rapid, usually small in size and many trades are taken each day.

The pros of day trading or scalping include smaller risk per trade through smaller stops losses and take profits. You can make money quicker although it takes deep focus in order to day trade.

There are always downsides to everything and with day trading you can loss money extremely rapidly as well as due to the amount of trades taken intraday traders pay a high level of brokers fees through commissions or the spread. Small mistakes like not respecting the stop loss levels can turn into very steep losses in a short amount of time or even worse blow out an account.

Swing trades can last from anywhere from one day to several days or even weeks. Typically swing traders try to catch price retraces or trend reversals using indicators or price action to help tell the tale of the tape. Using swing highs and lows from recent price action traders use these points of reference for placing their entries and exits.

One of the most loved time frames there are too many advantages to swing trading to talk about right now but among them are the ease of trade involved as you are trading higher time frames which result in less time needed to watch the market as needed when day trading.

One of the biggest disadvantages of swing trading is that traders tend to get emotional tied to their position believing they are going to be correct even if the position gets away from them. Even worse is when traders average down into a trade creating more of then not an even bigger loss.

Position trading often known as trend trading is also known as the buy and hold method where positions can be opened anywhere from a day until several months or longer. Traders open a position on what looks to be the start of a new trend and actually add to that position as the trend develops, taking profits along the way and adding even more size on pullbacks as they resume back toward the trend.

Some traders tell of the position trading style to be the easiest and most profitable. Fitting into any active lifestyles as often traded on the daily time frame it is also the most desirable! One signal period a day makes it very easy to manage and adjust new and open trade orders.

There is always a downside and when it comes to position trading the largest con is that often traders give back big gains while trying to hold a position for even larger gains.

Which time frame appeals to you and your personality? Are you the type of trader who likes lots of action and the rush of trading, or maybe do you like the detachment that swing trading or position trading brings? The first thing aspiring traders need to do is figure out which time frame suits them best before developing a trading method around the time frame.

The market may not be going in the direction you wish all the time. When that happens, we lose money. And we represent the amount of money you may lose with a letter R. We know that this is the largest amount you may lose if the investment turned bad. When we talk about risk, we also consider the potential return in an investment. We estimate the relationship between the two with a ratio in R. In fact, you might already know and actually be using such a method in other aspects of your life, you just need to be conscious of it and apply it to your assets management.

When you are given two choices, how would you come up with your decision? For example, there are two different methods for you to go home, one is to go on the high way, and another one is to go through the street. If you choose the high way, you may be able to get home within 30 minutes if everything is smooth. But there is a possibility that there is a traffic accident and you would need two more hours to get home. Choice number two is to try the streets with fewer cars. There are many traffic lights and whatever the traffic is, you would need 45 minutes to get home.

You would begin analyzing the two options and decide whether getting home 15 minutes earlier is worth the risk of being trapped in traffic jam for 2 hours. Similar decision making process can be seen in investment managements. The important reference is the ratio between the expected return and the potential loss you may pay. The ratio must be high enough to justify the actions.

The best investors use this return to risk ratio to assess their investment opportunities. A seasoned professional investor would always start an investment consideration with the possible amount of money he could lose in a particular investment. And we denote the amount by R. Let say the expected return is 3 times of the risk you bear, we say this is a 3R opportunity. Whether we are talking about stock, mutual fund, property or any other investment vehicle, we use this same system to categorize them. The assets are just the tools. What we concern is the money. So a 2R in stock market is in substance the same as a 2R in the property market. They all mean an opportunity to earn twice the amount of money you may lose. The below example would make it clear.

The first example is the situation where you have already decided to buy a house with a compromised price and sell it quickly thereafter. This is a quick cash transaction. You have decided to use USD5000 to buy a USD80 000 house. The amount USD5000 is the risk factor R which is the largest amount you can bear to lose. You wish to sell the house with a USD100 000 price. That is, a USD20 000 profit. This will be a 4R opportunity, because your planned profit is 4 times of the risk you bear.

Let’s say it turned out the market didn’t go up as much as you thought and you sold the house with $90,000. You made a profit of $10,000. So, we say the investment becomes a 2R one because the profits is 2 times the risk factor.

Forex has long been touted as the most liquid market in the world. If your new to this market, or even looking to increase your forex trading to a daily schedule, then you won’t want to miss this special day trading system.