A) Longer term strategies

• Swingtrading: Swingtrading means to hold stocks anywhere from one to five days and sometimes more. Swingtraders try to take advantage of certain “key” situations in a stock price’s movement. Such a situation would be a buy after a pullback into solid support during a longer term uptrend.

  Swingtrading is one of the easier stock trading strategies because it allows for significant returns without the time investment needed for day trading.

   

• Investing: Investors buy shares of a certain company because they believe in its long-term growth perspective. They have little interest in most of the daily price move merits and are looking to hold their shares for several years.

   

  About investing: I believe the definition I just used is a little limiting has it implies investors hold whatever what happens to the PPS so I’ll make it up here by saying an investor only buys stocks LONG based on fundamentals alone. My intention though is to teach you how to invest for the long term using technical indicators to plan the perfect entry and most importantly I'll help you maximize your profit while minimizing your losses. So yes, investing is one of the stock trading strategies!

B) Day trading. Some of the day trading strategies used by day traders are very time comsuming and stressful so I don’t recommend most of the following approaches. But here are the main approaches in case you decide it’s for you. (My trading plan applies to day trading too.)

• Momentum trading: A momentum trade usually lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to about 1 hour. Momentum trading is based on strong price movements and counter price movements often caused by news.
  
  
• Breakout trading: breakouts (breakdowns) do occur in any time frame. Popular charts for breakout traders are 5 minute and 15 minute charts. The holding period is anywhere from a few seconds (breakout scalp) up to the end of the day. Breakout trading means to buy stock after it has broken out above a certain price. Vice versa for shorts.
  
  
• Pullback trading: Pullback trading is the opposite of breakout trading. Pullback traders are looking for stock prices to pull back a significant enough amount (usually into support) in order for them to justify an entry (vice versa for shorts). Personally I am more of a breakout trader since I like the confirmation of the stock prices’ movement that I get thru the breakout; although pullback trading often has the smaller stops though. The holding period is usually a few seconds up to an hour.
  
  
• Scalping: Scalping is the toughest of all stock trading strategies and describes “ultra short term” trading. Scalpers try to take advantage of very small price movements and sell their shares immediately when they have a big enough profit or the stock isn’t moving in their direction or goes against them.
  
  
• Cutting the spread: Cutting the spread can be seen as a scalping variety. Cutting the spread means to take advantage of the spread (the price difference between the bid and the ask price). It means to buy a stock on the bid side and to sell it immediately afterwards on the ask side for a small profit.

Since the decimalization of the markets this type of trading has certainly become much more difficult because spreads have gotten much smaller, however I still see traders implementing this strategy pretty successfully.

Please note that the stock trading strategies presented here are by no means all the existing strategies but give you a general idea of what is done out there.