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.