Show: Technical Trading Analysis With Robert Episode: 20 Title: Swing Or Day Trading: Which Is Better Now? | Technical Trading Analysis With Robert Roy Ep. 20 Date: Jun 04, 2026 Runtime: ~27 min Video ID: ErqdxafQWNU URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErqdxafQWNU ============================================================ All right, everyone. Welcome to Technically Trading. Hope you're having a fantastic day. As we get started here, keep in mind that everything we look at is for education. Nothing's meant to be advice or recommendations. If you find something that you like, anything, make sure it fits your own personal risk profile and risk tolerance. If you're trying to see where we're at and follow along with us guys, we put out about 40 pieces of content today. Here's the various platforms that we're on with the handles for it. So you can just go to any one of those, you know, go to WealthBuilders for Instagram, same thing with WealthBuildersHQ for YouTube, TikTok, and so forth, right? So you can definitely follow along with us. All right. So I want to go ahead and I want to look first at the market and see what's going on. And if we look, let me just bring this in view as best as possible. So if we look, we've had, you know, all-time high, all-time high, again, again, again. Back off day yesterday, today where we gap down and we move back up again. That may be some of the War Powers Act. Uh there's definitely concerns of what happens in the Middle East now, whether it is, you know, the bomb concerns, the ships getting through the strait, or or whatever it is. It matters not from a political standpoint. What matters is can we find out what's happening, figure it out, and make money from it. That's all that really makes a difference. My very first workshop, my first training that I ever took, ever, uh on stock market education, there was a a plane had crashed or a problem with a plane, whatever it was, and it you know, the the speaker in the front of the room, you know, gets overhead with the trading department. It's okay, we want to place a trade on this, we want to buy puts on that, which are bearish, right? If you're familiar with them. And someone in the room said, "Wait, you people got hurt and you want to make money off of that. And he said, people got hurt whether I make money off of it or not, people still got hurt. And he said, and if you feel that strongly about it that you don't want to make money off of somebody else's misery, he said, go place the trade, make the money and then donate it, give it to the people that suffered. And that same person was like, well, I'm not giving it away. Well, it really isn't about the suffering then, right? It was just about the griping, having something to say. It's not about do I want to make money off of somebody else's misery. It has nothing to do with that. It's if there's an opportunity, should you pass it up? If someone lost a $20 bill and you saw it in the street, would you stand there and go, I probably should just leave it there cuz they may come back and get it. Yeah. Probably not. Okay? Did anybody lose this $20 bill? Yep, me. Someone's going to claim it, right? So, it's not a matter of trying to live off someone else's misery, but it is a matter of can I identify a way to find something to trade. These pullbacks that we've had recently, whether for whatever the reason was, the pullback meaning yesterday and then into today's gap down, whatever it was as far as news-based, I don't care from a political standpoint. I have my own views and my own opinions, which are just that. They're not part of what I do when I teach. They are part of what I do internally. But when it comes down to, I see a pattern, can I make money with it? That move down yesterday, that move down drove us right to our fib line, which has a confluence of our eight moving average. If we took a bounce off of that today on the open, I would have taken a bullish entry. We got a gap down. It's a whole different position. I'm back in position number one in my chair, all the way back here. Sorry if the mic gets a little lower. All the way back here. Just hands are not on the keyboard. I can't touch it, too far away. And I'm just watching big picture view. Right? We start moving back up today. Now I'm in position number two. I'm focused on the chart. I see what's going on there. I am paying close attention to it and I'm looking for a potential for where to get in the trade. Now, it's lunchtime. I don't normally trade at lunch. So, I'm waiting for that 1:30-ish period to see as we broke out do we pull back and bounce? There might be an opportunity for a trade there whether on the market or on a stock that has a pattern similar to that for today. But right now, again, looking at the S&P you can't look at THIS AND SAY, "OH, WE WENT DOWN yesterday and and we gap down today. So, what?" We're hitting all-time highs day after day after day after day. We need pullbacks. This run that we've seen in here this big move that's taken place inside of here that's too much. I need some pullback in there and it's not it's not just there. I mean, granted, that's where the majority of our move was recent move was, right? But you go back, I mean, we've we've just been on an overall tear from April of '25. Big move up. We had that kind of rounding top Well, it was a more of a channel pattern first. Right? We had more of this sideways pattern going on in there. Slight downward hint to it. Slightly lower tops. Slightly lower bottoms uh before we fell out of bed and gave a 10% correction from the 52-week high. Uh and we missed it by about 15, 18 dollars or so from hitting it exactly. And then we've skyrocketed from there. And this here was nothing. This little pullback THERE OF, "AH, THE MARKET'S FALLING." NO, THAT'S NOT IT. Just small corrections, folks. It it's normal. You You You need Remember, the best pattern that you could ever see has nothing to do with Fibonacci. It has nothing to do with support and resistance. None of that matters. The pattern is this. Move forward, pull back. Move forward, pull back. Move forward, pull back. If you can continue doing this, what's happening is the move up and we'll start with the initial move. This initial move up right here is being validated by this pull back and bounce. Right? This move up here, that second X, is being validated by this pull back and the bounce. Right? This next move up is being validated by this pull back and this bounce. And that's what we want to see. Two steps forward, one step back. Two steps forward, one step back. Notice I've got more steps forward. I'm moving in a forward direction. I'm not going two steps forward and four steps back. That may happen sometimes, but it cannot be a steady diet. I need progression moving forward. This is giving us a trend or a trending type market where we're continuing to move higher. We don't have much of the pull back. Yes, granted, we had some over here, which was just um a few weeks ago, two weeks ago or so. Right? We had some, but it's not much. And it was good. I was happy to see it. But what did we pull back? 1%? Was enough. I needed 10%, which actually would have taken us down at that time, would have taken us to this black line, 6765. Which is a super fib level, super Fibonacci level. Okay? I don't mean super fib like, "Wow, this is a great one." It's a super fib, meaning it it's extremely important from a Fibonacci line uh series. It is a critical number. It's a true Fibonacci number, 6765. Right? So, overall, from a market standpoint, life is good. Okay? But how many of you, if I ask you the question, how many of you are comfortable to say, "I could walk away from my trades, not look at them for a couple of weeks, leave them open, not leave look at them for a couple weeks, no stops, no targets, and I'd be okay." And I'm going to venture to say most of you would be like, "Hell no. I'm not walking away like that." And and I don't blame you. I've never advocated by the way to not have stops in place and minimal stop in place. If you don't put a target is one thing. Not putting a stop is crazy. That's where you lose all the money. If you had a gain in there and you gave it back cuz you didn't protect it, different story. But if you put $6 in the option and you have no stop and it goes to zero, you lost it all. If you put $6 in the option and it drops to five and you got out, it cost you a dollar. You didn't like it, but you're $5 better than you were with no stop in place. So I don't believe in not having stops in place. I always believed that there should be some kind of exit condition in place to help you in those scenarios. Right? We we never you never know what's going to happen. Catastrophe will happen. You will get gaps. You will get a stock shutting down where it can't be traded. You can't trade the options. It's frozen. It's closed the markets and the option goes to zero. It's going to happen at some point. Right? If you trade it off, you're going to see it happen. Right? But we don't want to steady diet of it. Right? So having stops in place are going to be critical for us. Well, when you look at what the markets are doing and just the of that comfort feel, you know, the the topic for today, if I can grab that again, where did it go? Okay. All right. So the topic for today, the weekly training topic, is swing trading or day trading, which is better now? There's going to be some controversy over this. Some of you are going to have some very strong opinions one direction or another about this. This is not about personal feelings. It's not about I'm a swing trader and that's the way everybody should trade. It's nothing to do with that. To me it comes down to is there one that's better than the other right now for giving me consistent opportunity and consistent profit potential. Not just the opportunity. Opportunity is there every day. But consistent opportunity with that setup and consistent profitability potential. Is that there? And which one would it be? A swing trade or a day trade? So, let's define both of them first before we get uh too far along the way here. So, swing trade. Right? That is basically where we're holding on to the trade, the position overnight, couple days, couple of weeks is what we're normally going to be in there. And you'll have different opinions as to how much length of time a swing trade is. For me as a brand new trader in 1997, I wanted nothing to do with day trades. Did not like them. It was not my billy wig. I wasn't excited about it. I didn't like trying to get in and out that quickly. I was not very good at it. But I had more of at that point I had more of that thinking plan mentality. I had not been through the battle enough times to to build that leather skin, you know, to be a a tough guy. When I was in manufacturing, uh they put me through every type of job in the facility. Even though I'm running the place, I'm I'm doing all these different jobs and working in a tool and die shop. And I got a metal splinter in my finger. And my uh coach, the person who ran, my mentor, the person who was running that department, his name was Gus. Gus Honigman. Old Austrian. Brilliant brilliant brilliant tool and die maker. And I get the the splinter in my finger and he goes, "Bob, you got to toughen up your skin. There's nothing wrong with the splinter. The splinter never should have gotten your hand. Your skin's got to get more tough. Right? And it's no different as a trader. You need that leather skin, that tougher skin. You don't get it without trading. And I'm talking about hitting enter, trade after trade after trade. It does not have to be funded trades. They have to be trades, but they don't have to be funded. I prefer them not to be and to be non-funded. Or what would be known sometimes as paper trades, right? White money versus green money. They're still money. It's just which one is costing you potentially, the other one is not. Right? But it's the only business, period, the end, that you can get a business started and practice the business with real results that you cannot do elsewhere. Tell me how you start a practice delicatessen that you open, a practice barber shop, a practice supermarket, gas station, whatever it is. How do you do a practice company? I'm going to have pretend rent and pretend customers. I have real numbers, real data coming in, and real opportunities to trade all day long. All night long if I want to trade in other markets. I could trade futures in in other markets. I could trade options in the European market or the Australian markets and and so forth, right? So there's plenty of ways to trade different times of the day. I'm going to stick with US markets. I'm going to stick with US times. I don't want to be a 24/7 guy in the markets. I actually do most of my trading in the morning. I do very little afternoons even now because I don't have the time. Just busy in life. You know, it's it's funny. You you start off when you're trading dollars for hours, right? I used to work 12 to 16 hours a day. So then coming in and putting in 6 and 1/2 hours of work, work hours, right? That was 9:30 to 4:00 was piece of cake. But of course I started a little bit earlier. I stayed a little bit later. I'd come back at night and look at futures trades in the evening, right? And and all of this was me sitting in front of my desk and not walking away. But when we look at how I traded then versus how I trade now, back then swing trades a couple of days, couple of weeks was the goal. And it was more weeks than it was days. We were using monthly options only. There were no weekly options when I first started. So you had to go third Friday of the month. And you needed at least 30 days until expiration. So we would would be trading. Here we are in the beginning of June. We would not be trading the June expiration of the third Friday of June. We'd be trading the third Friday of July. Or maybe even August, depending on how much open interest there was on the contracts. We might have to go further out. So, because they just wrote the July's possibly for certain stocks. So, to avoid that, we would go a little bit further, but you're paying a lot of money for time value to go that far out. And that was okay. It was a comfort level. I didn't have to make those snap decisions. Bam, bam, bam. Now, what are you doing? Jump. I don't want to jump. I want to look at it and say, "Okay, what about this? What about that?" Things have changed for me, and markets have changed. Right? Since COVID, back 2019, 2020, since COVID, everything about the market has changed. The players have changed. A tremendous amount of individuals in the market that were not in the market pre-COVID are there more as business opportunity individuals than I want to learn how to trade. It's a way to make money. It had nothing to do with we want to do it from the market. It's a business opportunity is all it is. It's a biz op. Uh is where you're finding people coming into even our own business. People are answering biz op type advertisements we put out there. Not, "Oh, I'm looking for traders." It's, "I'm looking Are you looking to make some money?" That type of opportunity. And the the mentality, the fear, the discipline is probably a good word, is not there today that it it should be. Where there's fearfulness of Yeah, I've got to be cautious. Because if I mess up, if I really mess up, I could lose it all. And as much as I've hated the pattern day trader rule, which is about gone at this point for most brokerage firms, right? It's They're coming up very soon. Everybody's trying to get right on doc and and get get it out of the gate with it immediately. Pattern day trader rule said you could not do more than three intraday trades in a five-day period if you had less than $25,000 in your account. Now again, I'm not a fan of the rule for the sake of how dare you tell me how dare you tell me that you get to decide how I spend my money. I have not amassed enough so you're going to limit how I spend it. Someone's got $25,001, they could choose how to spend it. I've got $24,997 and I can't? Sorry. Right? I mean, that's literally where you are at. That pattern day trader rule goes away. And as much as I am happy to see it go away, I'm a little sad at the same time. I think there was a stopgap for people that would just get crazy with the market and we'll find out in the next couple of weeks and months if we see some of these horror stories of no more pattern day trader rule and I lost my whole account in a week, a month, a year, whatever. Right? Because I just I over traded at that point. And again, I think you'll see some of it. So, when we look at here, if we pull up, let's say APP. Right? APP has got a bearish move to it and look at the bearish move where the Fibonacci's are drawn. They started up here. We move down, we climb back up. We move down, we climb back up. We move down, we climb back up. Great straight pattern, right? No, it's not. This is a a stair-step pattern, bearish, but a stair-step pattern. And we finally bottomed out, we moved up, fell back, stayed in there, moved up. No more of the same pattern here. We've kind of come out of that range. And then look at the mix of candles inside here. So, yep, you you had this breakout here and you missed it. Right? It opened up here. G- um gapped up a little bit, pulled back a little, never got to support, it ran, took off through this fib line, you didn't get in, and now you're waiting. We finally move above, we retest, we bounce, you get in, and now it's failed. This is consistent. I run a program called power option plays. Inside of power option plays, we meet twice a week where I do a live training. It's video recorded, but I do it for me, it's live of this is what we're looking at, this is what our setups are for tomorrow, here's the way to get in, here's the way to get out, here's our targets, our stops, all of that is predetermined based on a rules-based system that we use. And we do swing trades and day trades in there. Okay, now we only take swing trades in the direction of the overall market. So right now, the overall market, the S&P, is bullish, so we would only take bullish trades. We would not take a bearish position, period, in this marketplace. We won't do it. Right? Uh and if we do, if we do take it, we're going to take it aggressive. Meaning, we'll do less contracts. But my goal is to really find things that move in the direction of the S&P. Well, if you look right in here, how well would this have done for you with a swing trade? It closed at support, it bounced. Okay, that one made it, and it pulled back, and it broke out. Great. But look at all of the fails that happened in here. And we didn't quite make it. Lower highs than higher lows and just not not giving us a consistent pattern. Hence, me saying I prefer, I like the the day trades today better than I like the swing trades. As much as I don't have a problem with swing trades, I feel that there's too much opportunity for risk happening. So again, if we kind of bring this in just to to talk it out, and I'm going to get rid of my crosshair. Let me get a drawing tool. Grab red. So, let's say on this day, this day we opened up here, we had a low down here, a high of course, and a close. Right? So, what if as we opened up, we dropped? We let it get down here to this purple fib line. We let it get which is that 593 or four level. We let it get above that 600 level. It breaks above, it retests, it bounces. We get into this position at 594, 595. I'll call it 595. It's easy, right? 595. Okay. So, we're at 595. And then it pulls back a little bit by the end of the day and that gives us approximately six Let's see what that is. 605, 606 is where our close was. So, we've had a nice move, but you held it overnight. And then we get a gap down. We stretch up to a resistance level, a form of a resistance level, 100 point level, 600 point level, and we just collapse. Collapse. So, if I did a day trade and as we bounced off of that 600 level, I took an entry at 601, 602, and got out at 604, 605, even 606 by the end of the day. I got out. I pick up two, three, four dollars. Holding it overnight, we get this massive problem. If you took this trade here on this breakout and it failed by the end of the day, it gapped up to resistance and failed again. And this is not just APP. This is over and over and over again. We are constantly finding candidates do this exact same pattern where we do not have a smooth flow of movement. You know, Costco recently has had this big pullback. And we had a bit of a run. And that's great. Yeah, let's get rid of the crosshair again. So, if you look here, we made a move up, we gave almost all of it back. We made a move up, a little bit lower high than we had before. A little bit higher low. Here we had a higher low there, and this one cranked. Right? But then So, we did a swing trade, we gap down, we gap again. So, if you look at it here here's the rationale. At least this was how my rationale was as a newer trader. All right, we're going to we get this move out. We got we took a trade right here. Here's the entry. All right, we think it's going up. Here's the entry. We close right here, we gap down on the open, and then we gap or we close down at the bottom of that candle, near the very bottom, near the the the low of the day, but we get below the fib line. You know, I'm going to wait one more day and see if it comes back. And then tomorrow we get a gap down. Oh, no, let's see if it bounces from here. And now it closes down there. I'm going to wait just one more day. And the next day it gaps down and you say, all right, it's gone too far. Now I can't get out. My $13 option is now worth six. By this time it's worth two. Over here it might be worth two and a half or three because time value is drastically reducing in here. Volatility's are kicking up. There's a volatility uh flip where they're taking they're pulling the volatility out of the calls and they're dumping it into the puts and we're just losing value with time going by, right? Theta burn and all of that. So, for me personally, I would rather look at trades that are day trades right now than look at swing trades. Once again, you choose what you want to do. From my perspective, I would rather do a day trade than a swing trade. I don't have anything anything here that told me recently good potential swing trade. Yeah, swing trade. Could I do a a swing trade to the downside? Yeah, I can, but it seems like we we go up two three days, we go sideways down two days. We go up sideways two days, we go down two days. We go sideways two days, we go down and I would for a flat. That's more of sideways, I guess, but as far as close goes. But we don't have a good answer as to the where. So, what do we do? With this market condition, I think right now and for the foreseeable future, I think day trades are going to be the thing. I think that's what we need to live right now is a day trades. I think swing trades brings way too much risk to us to be concerned with right now. I think we've got to focus on day trades and day trades only and swing trades will be something that we get to add back in, but just not today. Right? Vix is great as far as level goes where you know, 15 16-ish level 17 level right now. So, we're doing well on Vix. We're low. It's actually medium. It's moderate as far as the level goes, but we don't have a lot of volatility in the market right now, which is good. But the volatility is still in the stocks because they're ups and downs of one and two days and no clear and defined condition movement point. You know, you look at Netflix. Netflix did their split and they just drove down, right? We had a buying opportunity here, second buying opportunity there, a third one was a buying opportunity here. Right? So, plenty of chances in there, but look at the candles. Look at the overall pattern. Do you see consistent? I see white Well, let's go. Um well, one two three four five six seven white candles, two black. One white, three black. Three white, three black. White, black, two black. We're all over the place. There's no consistency at all. We need consistency to be able to get back into that swing trade, and we don't have it at this point. So, day trades give us a much more relaxed way of trading right now than a swing trade does. It lets me, personally, sleep at night, which I will not be doing if I'm carrying positions, option positions, overnight. All right, and there you have it, everybody. So, just keep your eye focused on it, and remember this one thing as we wrap up here. The word loss should be completely gone from your vocabulary. Anything that you consider to be a loss or a losing trade, that is no longer a losing trade. That is a learning opportunity. And that's the way you need to treat it as a learning opportunity. So, with that, make it a profitable day. Stay focused on the quest to becoming a great trader. Keep crushing it, and remember, you're just one trade away. I will see you all at our next update, folks. Don't miss out on our power hour on Mondays right here as well. Take care. We'll see you soon. Bye for now. You know how the financial world goes. Here comes the buzzkill. Please make sure to take some time to read this boring disclaimer. We will owe you one.