What Is Swing Trading?

Swing trading is a rule-based trading strategy that aims to capture the profitability from short-term trends. A typical holding period for swing trading is two to five trading days, and rarely exceeds two weeks.

As a rule-based trading strategy, swing trading can be implemented using an algorithmic trading approach by using technical or fundamental indicators to generate trading signal and trading orders.

Swing traders use a variety of techniques to identify trading opportunities, such as:

• Technical chart (e.g., Bollinger band chart, candlestick chart, and point-and-figure chart)
• Hypothesis testing, machine learning, and pattern recognition
• Analysis of financial time series to generate trading signals
• Technical indicators (e.g., MACD, RSI, Williams %R, stochastic)

For more on tools for swing trading, see MATLAB^®, Datafeed Toolbox™, and Financial Toolbox™.