UGH... update... turns out over all my trades in 2024 I have made a net profit on day trades and a net loss (and not a small one) on swing trades. As much as I hate it, maybe day trading is the way to go.
If you hate day-trading that much, then it might not be sustainable long-term because eventually the ‘unhappy part’ of you might engage in subconscious self-sabotage and you might end up running in circles. Do some soul searching, maybe you could be transferring some issue onto the market. At least I was, I didn’t want to commit to trading in a new time zone and eventually I had to make a peace with it. It still sucks somewhat, but now I’m focusing on gratitude and that makes things more enjoyable.
By the way, judging your performance by P/L can mislead you. Consider more objective metrics, such as entering your “risk-multiples’ distribution into a spreadsheet, and then start analysing where your problems are and then come up with implementing solutions.
Ask yourself if the R-multiples distribution is suffering due to you not cutting losses, or not nailing down profits, or a style drift, or poor stock selection, or not following you rules, etc. . .
Then also separately analyse the consistency of your position sizing, and wether or not you’re appropriately scaling up when trading well, and scaling down when trading poorly, or trading too large so you cannot sleep at night. Maybe variables like these needs to be addressed to get your swing trading into profits.
You can also calculate your “Trading Efficiency Ratio” and use that as an objective guideline for improvemnt. The formula for this is: “Your number of trades in which you followed your rules divided by the total number of your trades.” This will reveal how inefficient you’re as a trader, and then you can start working on your inefficiencies as separate variables from your TA strategies instead of mixing up all the variable together.
Either way, you need to figure out which timeframes and trading style fit your own personality, and then come up with ways to enjoy it. I’m not good at holding swing trades either, the trading style and time-frame needs to fit you, it really does.