Investor Education
Four Different Styles Used for Trading Stocks
Four Different Styles Used for Trading Stocks
While many investors try to emulate “buy and hold” investors like Warren Buffett, not everyone has the conviction or the patience to wait out positions over years or decades.
For active investors in the market, it’s pretty common to see switching in and out of positions – sometimes over the course of months to years, and sometimes on a much more frequent basis.
Trading Stocks: Examining Four Styles
Today’s infographic comes to us from StocksToTrade and it highlights key differences between four trading styles, along with the methods frequently used to identify each trade.
The styles range from having holding periods of months or years, all the way down to mere minutes!
As these holding timeframes get smaller, the focus typically shifts from evaluating a stock’s fundamentals to gauging short-term technical indicators.
1. Position Trading
Position traders look closely at a company’s fundamentals in order to accumulate sizable positions that they hold for periods of months or years. This could be done using growth investing or value investing methodologies. Meanwhile, technical analysis can be used to time each individual trade.
2. Swing Trading
Swing traders go with the flow. They aim to capture the gains of a stock (or options) as they attain short-term momentum in the market. This can be achieved by having a watch list of many interesting stocks, and constantly evaluating technical indicators until an opportunity is spotted.
3. Day Trading
The notorious day trader is usually glued to his or her computer screen, trading stocks throughout the course of a day. It’s a full-time job not meant for the faint of heart; however, there are people out there who have developed very effective strategies as well as the work ethic to do it strategically.
4. Scalp Trading
In scalp trading, it can be said that small profits add up. The goal here: to sell every time a profit window appears, and to do so many, many times!
This usually involves thousands of trades in a year and access to a live feed and direct-access broker. Scalp trading also requires a strict exit strategy, as any whiff could erase many previous gains.
Investor Education
How MSCI Builds Thematic Indexes: A Step-by-Step Guide
From developing an index objective to choosing relevant stocks, this graphic breaks down how MSCI builds thematic indexes using examples.
How MSCI Builds Thematic Indexes: A Step-by-Step Guide
Have you ever wondered how MSCI builds its thematic indexes?
To capture long-term, structural trends that could drive business performance in the future, the company follows a systematic approach. This graphic from MSCI breaks down each step in the process used to create its thematic indexes.
Step 1: Develop an Index Objective
MSCI first builds a broad statement of what the theme aims to capture based on extensive research and insights from industry experts.
Steps 2 and 3: List Sub-Themes, Generate Keyword List
Together with experts, MSCI creates a list of sub-themes or “seedwords” to identify aligned business activities.
The team then assembles a collection of suitable documents describing the theme. Natural language processing efficiently analyzes word frequency and relevance to generate a more detailed set of keywords contextually similar to the seedwords.
Step 4: Find Relevant Companies
By analyzing financial reports, MSCI picks companies relevant to the theme using two methods:
- Direct approach: Revenue from a company’s business segment is considered 100% relevant if the segment name matches a theme keyword. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes from these directly-matched segments make up the eligible SIC code list used in the indirect approach.
- Indirect approach: If a segment name doesn’t match theme keywords, MSCI will:
- Analyze the density of theme keywords mentioned in the company’s description. A minimum of two unique keywords is required.
- The keyword density determines a “discount factor” to reflect lower certainty in theme alignment.
- Revenue from business segments with an eligible SIC code, regardless of how they are named, is scaled down by the discount factor.
The total percentage of revenue applicable to the theme from both approaches determines a company’s relevance score.
Step 5: Select the Stocks
Finally, MSCI narrows down the stocks that will be included:
- Global parent universe: The ACWI Investable Market Index (IMI) is the starting point for standard thematic indexes.
- Relevance filter: The universe is filtered for companies with a relevance score of at least 25%.
- False positive control: Eligible companies that are mapped to un-related GICS sub-industries are removed.
Companies with higher relevance scores and market caps have a higher weighting in the index, with the maximum weighting for any one issuer capped at 5%. The final selected stocks span various sectors.
MSCI Thematic Indexes: Regularly Updated and Rules-Based
Once an index is built, it is reviewed semi-annually and updated based on:
- Changes to the parent index
- Changes at individual companies
- Theme developments based on expert input
Theme keywords are reviewed yearly in May. Overall, MSCI’s thematic index construction process is objective, scalable, and flexible. The process can be customized based on the theme(s) you want to capture.
Learn more about MSCI’s thematic indexes.
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