Picking the right stock and the timeframes for investing is driven by several factors including:
- personality
- appetite for monitoring

My investment strategy ranges from looking for opportunities during the day, to finding those longer-term investments that don't require much hand holding.

The level of information in the market can be daunting; and you can spend a significant portion of your time looking for those situations.

I have found myself in that category; and while I love to invest and trade, I also want to be able to do other things in life. This led me to develop a solution that lets me see the high probability stock opportunities quickly. I focus on a subset of the largest, most liquid stocks. Once I see these opportunities I log them...and my system notifies me via text and email of the opportunity, or opportunities.

As the investment opportunities mature, I update my log with the result and my solution keeps track of the history of the stocks opportunities.

For me stock investment timeframes may be as short as 1 day; but more generally are 1 to 3 weeks in length; and depending on the stock may be several months.

Some like to invest for longer periods of time. In my own testing and investing, the buy and hold strategy has a lot of challenges with it. But, there are challenges for shorter periods of time as well...if you do it well, it will produce more rewards. Each market entry introduces risk.

A personal favorite strategy is to let time work on my side. What this means is I believe it is difficult enough to get the direction right for an investment. So, I like to increase my probabilities permitting time decay with options on stocks to work in my favor. This gives some leeway for establishing direction. However, it means the option market needs to have sufficient volatility and premiums.

So, figure out the timeframe you are going to invest and trade, then figure out the strategy for that investment, are you going to buy the stock? Will you use options? In what situations will you use certain investment or trading strategies?

While trading using time decay is a personal favorite, I have developed algorithms for identifying directional opportunities on stocks. For many years I traded stocks non-directionally; selling iron condors and other such strategies. But, the premiums are so narrow recently and also the margin requirements are so high that I have developed algorithms that use multiple characteristics to determine hi-probable opportunities.

So, to answer my own question regarding using options, I trade options using the algorithms that I have developed. In some cases I use spreads and in other cases I trade naked options.

But the probabilities for any given trading opportunity is improved by understanding the culmination of multiple factors. What factors are important to you? When it comes to timeframes for swing trading I use daily, weekly, and monthly timeframes for my algorithms.

If you are not using algorithms to create a conglomerate view of the current investing opportunity; be sure to set up your charts to permit you to see daily, weekly, and monthly views of the stock's price action. This simple step will help with establishing the context to help your decision making.

If you'd like to learn more about these strategies...you can contact me at grant@financialinvestingsecrets.com.

Until next time...Trade with your brain!