Swing trading is the style that holds positions from a few days to a few weeks. Entry decisions are made at end-of-day, exits are managed against pre-set stops and targets, and the trader doesn't need to watch the market intraday to execute the plan.
It's the most retail-accessible style by a wide margin. You can run a swing strategy with a day job — set alerts, manage stops at the end of the session, review trades on weekends. No screen-time arms race, no per-tick latency advantage matters, and the broker's basic order types are sufficient. The barrier to entry is the lowest of any active style.
The trade-off is sample size. A scalper gets a hundred trades a day; a swing trader gets two or three a week. Statistical confidence in your edge takes much longer to develop — 100 trades at 3 per week is 8 months of journal data. Strategy iteration cycles are slow because each iteration takes a year to validate.
Common swing setups: pullback-to-moving-average entries on trending names, breakouts from multi-week consolidations, post-earnings drift, sector-rotation rebalances. The math typically lands at 45-55% win rates with 1.5-2.5R average winners — high enough on both axes to compound durably without requiring exceptional execution skill. Swing trading is the style that survives the most traders' transition from amateur to consistent, partly because the slower pace lets the journal review actually catch up to the trade frequency.