- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Completion
Related terms
Traders who place buys/sells and close their positions before the market resets at 5pm EST.
A number of currency units used to place a buy or sell position. View micro, mini, and standard lot. Also view contract size.
Keeping an active trade running from one business day to the next.
Any money you gain from your trades that increase your accounts original capital.
The process of profiting off of small gains from the market by getting in and out of trades. Scalpers can place as many trades as they want within a day. Their goal is to get in a trade, make some money relatively quickly, and get out; over and over again before the day ends.
Holding a position for longer than a day. Swing traders can hold their trades over long periods of time by looking at the bigger overall trend of the market. Swing traders aren’t looking to get in and out of trades like scalpers or even place a few every day like Day Traders. Swing traders like to place a few trades and hold them for days, weeks, even months at a time.
A market giving a high volume of trade opportunities.
Measurement that measures the total number of traders within the market.
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BeginnerEarly Stages for Beginners8 Topics
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Forex Terminology11 Topics
- Major and Minor Currency Pairs
- Basic Forex Terminology
- Pips & Ticks
- The Broker & The Spread
- What is a Lot?
- Stop Loss & Take Profit
- Margin & Leverage
- Retracement & Reversal
- When Can I Trade Forex? Sessions - Market Open and Close
- 3 Types of Analysis (Technical, Fundamental, Sentiment)
- 3 Ways a Market Can Go (Up, Down, Sideways)
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Margin & Leverage2 Topics
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Personal Psychology Questions2 Topics
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Psychology for Beginners7 Topics
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IntermediateIdentifying Scams2 Topics
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Brokers for Beginners5 Topics
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Technical Analysis13 Topics
- Types of Charts
- Understanding Japanese Candlesticks
- Candlestick Patterns For Beginners
- Single, Double & Triple Candlestick Patterns
- Support and Resistance
- Confluences w/ Candlesticks & Support & Resistance
- Trendlines
- Counter Trend Trading/ Counter Trend Lines
- Fibonacci
- Moving Average
- Top-Down Analysis
- Fakeouts
- Consolidation Trading (Breakout, Retest, Continuation)
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Market Structure5 Topics
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CompletionRisk Management for Beginners8 Topics
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Fundamental Analysis9 Topics
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AdvancedUsing Indicators6 Topics
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Technical Analysis (Part 2)8 Topics
Scalping vs. Intraday Trading vs. Swing Trading
(3 Types of Trading)
Finding out which type of trader you are depends on the trading style you fall under. In this market, there are 3 styles of trading. One or a combination of two may be best suited for you and your personality. You may be someone who is quick to react in seconds or minutes, someone who only wants to be in a trade for a couple of hours or someone who prefers a couple of days. Here, we’ll talk about the three different styles of trading. The main difference between the three is how it operates on different time frames. The higher the time frame, the longer a trader holds his or her position.
Scalping
Scalpers are traders who want to get in and out of the market fast. Trading volatile pairs are best for scalpers as they look to profit off of the lower time frames for 10-30 pips. If you are a scalper, you are looking to hold your trade for a few seconds or minutes, but no longer than an hour, if even that. Scalpers monitor their charts for the duration of the trade unlike the other two types of traders. There’s risk in any type of trading, but to make a profit, the lot size would have to be higher because lots profit off of small price movements.
A scalper tends to place more trades than an intraday and swing trader to increase their profits since they catch the smaller moves in the market. There are many different ways to scalp in the market, just as there are different intraday and swing trading strategies. If you lack the patience to hold a trade for hours/days and you spot opportunities quickly, this style of trading may be for you.
Intraday
Intraday traders are looking to hold for a few hours and close before the end of the trading day. They look to catch anywhere from 30-100 pips a day. The best part about this style of trading is that it stems from both scalping and swing trading. Intraday traders look for trends and confirmation on an hourly time frame and entries on a lower time frame like the 15 minute time frame. When price comes to your interest point but you’re looking to hold for a bigger pip gain, you will need to be able to make quick decisions. This requires more patience than scalping because you have to wait for the best trading opportunity. There are many intraday strategies, but if you trade level to level, you may fall between intraday and swing trading.
Swing
Swing traders hold their trades for days and up to a few weeks – sometimes even a few months. They look at the higher time frames like the daily and weekly, trying to spot swing highs and swing lows. They also pay close attention to Fundamentals, as it can cause huge shifts in the market. This style of trading is great for someone with other obligations because it is not required for the trade to be monitored as often. This also requires extreme discipline and patience knowing that the market HAS to reverse on, let’s say, week 2. Then it must reverse on Week 4 to create higher highs/higher lows or lower highs/lower lows. It can take days for a trading opportunity to present itself, and longer for it to hit its profit target, but the profit target can be significant for only analyzing a chart a few times, placing a trade, and leaving it alone for a few weeks/months, as opposed to constantly being in and out of a trade.