Is It Possible to Trade and Have a Full-Time Job?
Dear traders,
Do you believe that trading is not for the full-time employees, entrepreneurs, and self-employed because it requires too much time and dedication?
This article explains why trading the financial markets is actually possible for both intra-day and long-term traders.
In fact, trading is open to everyone who is willing to try it and offers exciting benefits and opportunities when compared to investing or buying and holding.
Combining Full-Time Work with Trading
Intra-day trading is exciting and lucrative, but a difficult skill to master, especially if you are trying to cover your monthly living costs.
It is also very time consuming, which makes it especially hard for people who have full-time jobs or businesses. They tend to think that their daily schedule limits their ability to engage in trading the financial markets, which is probably why many people choose to invest their savings.
The solution is no rocket science – trade on higher time frames. By swing or long-term trading, they can reap the benefits of both worlds:
- Earn a steady income besides trading;
- Experience less financial stress when trading;
- Use the ability to trade the markets.
Sure, there will be less trade setups when compared to intra-week or intra-day trading, but there are still plenty of trading opportunities remaining in a month or quarter.
The benefits of trading higher time frames, however, are clear:
- Trading higher time frames allows traders to analyse, monitor, and trade at the times of their choice, whether it's multiple times a day, once a day or even once a week.
- This long-term style of trading is much easier to fit within your busy schedule.
- In addition, it could be a lot less stressful than trading intra-day charts.
The exact schedule is something that each of us needs to decide for themselves, but just make sure it's realistic and manageable. It is much better to have a lighter analysis-trading schedule that you can handle rather than a heavy one which you fail to follow.
Trading requires more work than investing, which might need your attention once a month, quarter, or year. The main advantage of trading, however, is that you can capitalise on multiple price movements more frequently. You are also more up-to-date of the current price action, which makes you less vulnerable to ill advice or market changes.
Actively trading is a skill worth developing. Taking your financial security, goals, and growth in your hands is well worth the investment and the time. Trading, in my view, allows us to reach these goals quicker than "buying and holding".
How to Trade Long-term Charts
Long-term trading is all about using long-term charts, i.e., daily, weekly and monthly charts. Traders can use the flexibility of the Forex market to compare multiple currency pairs with each other to find the best setup(s) for the week or month.
Reviewing daily, weekly, and monthly charts will not require much of your time:
- The monthly charts are best analysed once a new monthly candle is available on the first trading day of the new month.
- Weekly charts can be examined over the weekend, while daily charts can be monitored every day or every few days (depending on your system).
- This time schedule should be manageable for anyone who is serious about learning a new skill as important as financial trading.
The next key questions is, of course, how to trade with and on these charts?
There are, of course, multiple ways of trading higher time frames. Luckily, we had a four-part webinar series about trading higher time frames – watch the videos below and above for examples.
In general though, both Nenad and I heavily use price action, candlesticks, and candlestick patterns for lots of our trading decisions. Candlesticks provide us with market information about its:
- direction (candle body)
- sentiment (candle wicks)
- volatility (candle size)
A trader needs to apply candlestick information within proper context of analysing the larger market structure, which consists of support & resistance, trend & momentum, as well as price patterns. Once completed, candlesticks also offer value when taking actual trading decisions.
Cheers and safe trading,
Chris Svorcik
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