Successful traders have said over and over again that the surest way to success is to trade a time frame that fits your personality best. There are three major time frames that can be summarized as day trading, swing trading and position trading. In order to help you decide which is best for you we will now take a look at an overview of each.

Day trading or intraday trading are quick trades that often last anywhere from minutes to hours and take place within the same trading day. Day trading is also known as scalping and trades are very rapid, usually small in size and many trades are taken each day.

The advantages of day trading or intraday trading include little risk as each trade generally has a very tight stop loss and also small take profit levels. Scalping takes a lot of intense focus in order to manage each trade and watch the market fluctuations.

There are always downsides to everything and with day trading you can loss money extremely rapidly as well as due to the amount of trades taken intraday traders pay a high level of brokers fees through commissions or the spread. Small mistakes like not respecting the stop loss levels can turn into very steep losses in a short amount of time or even worse blow out an account.

Swing trades can last from anywhere from one day to several days or even weeks. Typically swing traders try to catch price retraces or trend reversals using indicators or price action to help tell the tale of the tape. Using swing highs and lows from recent price action traders use these points of reference for placing their entries and exits.

One of the most loved time frames there are too many advantages to swing trading to talk about right now but among them are the ease of trade involved as you are trading higher time frames which result in less time needed to watch the market as needed when day trading.

The downside or cons of swing trading is that traders can get emotional attached to their trades and expected outcome allowing trades to spiral out of control and turn what should had been a small loss into a large loser.

Position trading often known as trend trading is also known as the buy and hold method where positions can be opened anywhere from a day until several months or longer. Traders open a position on what looks to be the start of a new trend and actually add to that position as the trend develops, taking profits along the way and adding even more size on pullbacks as they resume back toward the trend.

Position trading pros include it is the easiest method to trade and profit from as will as easiest time frame to be able to fit into an active lifestyle. Preparation can be done at your leisure and traders only require little of their time to actually place any new trades or adjust any orders.

Position traders sometimes do hold onto losing positions too long causing weeks of gains to disappear quickly. Nothing is worse for a trader mentally than to turn a big winner into a large loser and this does sometimes happen to trend position traders.

Which time frame appeals to you and your personality? Are you the type of trader who likes lots of action and the rush of trading, or maybe do you like the detachment that swing trading or position trading brings? The first thing aspiring traders need to do is figure out which time frame suits them best before developing a trading method around the time frame.

Deciding what time frame to trade will help you reach the goal of full time forex trading much quicker.