Over my short career of full-time trading (just over 1yr) I have tried every type of trading you can imagine. I have been long and short in stocks, stock options, index futures, bond futures, currencies, and currency futures. I have tried swing trading, daytrading, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, wild guesses, and even taken trading tips from other traders. My first year of trading was an experiment, and I did a lot of experimenting.

Now that I have all that behind me I am trying to focus my efforts on the mastery of one skill. I have read enough to know that most market participants find a niche where they make the most money and feel the most comfortable. Most traders just can’t sustain profitability when they are spread over multiple instruments and time frames. That being said, I am trying to find my niche. I’ve had the feeling for a couple months now that my trading skills were best used in daytrading.

Last night I decided to run some numbers to find out if my trading history would confirm my hypothesis. Here are the results from the last 11 weeks of daytrading from the beginning of November (that’s when I started daytrading again).

+1,190 +629 -610 +63 +940 +1,796 -171 +208 -615 +130 +543

That comes to 8 positive weeks and three negative weeks for a 72% win rate. I also noticed that my two biggest losing weeks were -615 and -610, where my biggest winners came in at +1,190 and +1,796. I don’t think I can ask for better results being so new to trading. My total profits for 2.5 months comes in at +4,103.

I also put on a few swing trades from Nov-Jan and I think the results speak volumes. I took four swing trade positions (all longs) in MA, SPWR, RIMM, and HES losing -4,056 -1,727 -838 and -466 respectively. In these 4 trades I lost -7,087 almost twice the amount of my profits from daytrading. This unquestionably tells me that I need to focus on daytrading and go cold turkey on the swing trades. Even though most of my losses came from being caught long in the sell off that came with the new year, I see no reason for me to continue swing trading.

This is the official end of my swing trading career. Luckily, my brother seems to do really well with swing trading, so all is not lost. I can focus on my daytrading and help him run scans and do research for swings. Separately we might be half a trader each, but together we can do the job of one real trader.