Finding a Strategy

When I started on stocks, I had intended to trade them regularly in order to lock in profits and move on to the next opportunity. It hasn't really worked out that way. Currently, I'm hovering around the point where I break even since I started this blog. I believe I'm up slightly due to the BMO dividend, but I haven't recieved it yet.

So today, I started reading a bit. At first, I was mainly interested in how to read candle charts, as that had not been well explained in my class. But the website that I linked also discussed one type of trading strategy - swing trading - which makes a lot of sense to me.

Essentially the strategy revolves around identifying stocks that are in an uptrend (or downtrend for shorting purposes), and buying during "swings" in the trend...slight corrections in the middle of a larger trend.

So, I took at look at the technical strategy outlined there, and compared it to my own current holdings. While the news is optimistic on two TSX:BMO and, I think, TSX-V:WEE, it's a little less so on TSX:FR. Indeed, the chart seems to show that its recent recovery could just be the first swing in a downtrend.



So I'm left with a dilemma. I still think that FR is a solid company, and will come back, but I might potentially make more money if I were to cut my losses and try to catch a stock that is actually moving up right now.

There's conflicting emotions, too. (Anyone who can trade stocks completely on technical aspects must have balls of steel.) On the one hand, I am tired of holding on to the same three stocks hoping for good things to happen. But on the other, I am hesitant to sell stocks that I am optimistic about just because they've hit a rough patch.

Markets are closed for the weekend now, so I've got a few days to mull those thoughts over. It's really a decision between finding and sticking to a strategy, whether that be the buy and hold stocks with good fundamentals, or frequent technical trading. We'll see how I feel about it on Monday.