Best Swing Trading Courses

How do you make a second salary by working just a few extra hours a week?

The answer to that question for many investors is swing trading—a trading strategy that involves making a profit on major price movements. Price “swings” such as these usually take weeks or months to unfold, so keeping on top of them isn’t something that requires a metric ton of coffee a day.

This is why swing trading is one of the most popular active investing methods. But according to several studies, 70%-80% traders lose money—and you don’t want to be among them, but on the winning side.

The markets have been very volatile in recent years, and every now and then we see a major geopolitical event like the Russia-Ukraine conflict turn everything upside down. The thing is, volatile markets are risky and not welcoming to beginners, which is why everyone who doesn’t want to end up in the bottom 80% needs to enter the markets prepared.

And that’s where swing trading courses come in. In this list, we’ve selected what we think are the best swing trading courses online today—some of them are pricey and suitable for very devoted traders, while some cater more to the casual investor, but all of them are legit and lauded by their students. So, without further ado, let’s see what these courses have to offer, what they can teach you, and if they are worth what they cost.

Founded by Ben Zogby in 2018, HighStrike has managed to carve out a unique niche and cultivate a strong, 10,000+ strong trading community across 142 countries. The secret to HighStrike’s success? Giving traders direct access to 3 funded prop traders who give the service a unique edge in terms of the quality and hands-on approach of the education they provide.

The Trading School will set traders back a relatively steep one-time fee of $397—however, you get plenty in return. Before we move on to the significant “added bonuses”, let’s focus on the educational course alone for the time being.

HighStrike’s course consists of 30+ hours of video content, and is a modular, self-paced program that consists of five parts:

• Setting up for success
• The technical analysis blueprint
• The A – Z options roadmap
• The advanced strategies toolkit
• Case Studies & live trade library

Whereas the first module covers the very basics (everything from how to set up a brokerage account to the difference between cash and margin accounts), the second introduces the essentials of short-term trading.

Now, we have to mention one key point here—as a comprehensive course that aims to be a one-stop shop, the curriculum deals with day trading first and covers the topic much more often, before introducing swing trading in the fourth module. 

We wouldn’t necessarily consider this a drawback, however—for continued success in swing trading, which hinges on timing and precision, a strong background in day trading, the foremost short-term approach, is preferred. 

As an additional aside, the last module, which contains previously live-streamed trading sessions executed by the in-house team of prop traders, contains a wide variety of swing trades and serves as an excellent source for hands-on learning.

In addition to the course, membership gives traders access to a video library with more than 115 educational videos and a trading psychology expert.

However, the standout feature of HighStrike’s Trading School is direct access to funded prop traders. Although the simple fact of logistics means that 3 traders can’t keep up with 10,000 students in real-time, the in-house team does offer insights in terms of market analysis, reviews members’ trades, and answers questions as fast as they can.

On top of that, the community is quite active—and members also get access to:

• An extensive resource library that includes watchlists, stock chart pattern reference sheets, and even options analysis summary sheets
• Trade trackers and position sizing workbooks
• Quizzes attached to the end of each course module for testing your knowledge
• A daily briefing video sent out during the US premarket session, detailing three tickers that the in-house experts are looking to trade that day

To cap things off, HighStrike also has a 30-day refund policy in place. Users who participate in the Discord channel each day, prove that they’ve watched all recordings shared in that timeframe, and failed to produce gains equal to $397 can get a full refund.

---

2. Investors Underground: Best for Educational Content

A top-level swing trading course should be something that will continue to be of value to you even if you grow from a beginner to a pro—and that’s why we gave Investors Underground the first place on our list. The organization was founded by Nathan Michaud—a veteran trader and instructor known for endorsing safe, sensible investing methods—and it is more of a community than anything else. 

Here is how it works: The website offers courses on all types of trading, including swing trading—this includes more than a thousand video lessons in total. The lessons themselves are well-made and a complete beginner can use them to learn all the basics, as well as advanced trading strategies, but the real education at IU begins after the lessons are over.

As one of the most vibrant trading communities online, Investors Underground gives its users access to different chat rooms where they can chat with experienced traders who share their ideas and strategies. This sort of feature is invaluable because it gives users insight into the minds of pros, helping them grow from intermediate to advanced traders.

The website also has regular webinars hosted by Michaud, as well as other expert traders—most of whom can be your mentors in a sense that you can ask them for advice. And, for traders who need a bit more support and mentorship, there is a chatroom called “the trader’s lounge” where everyone can ask questions that will be answered by the website’s pro traders.

This service is not the cheapest: A monthly membership is $297, the quarterly option is $697, and the yearly subscription is $1887. However, even at this price, IU is a fantastic boon for DIY traders who want to be self-sufficient in the markets without relying on trade signals and other communities to figure out their next move.

---

3. Warrior Trading: Most Comprehensive

If you want to get a real comprehensive swing trading education and familiarize yourself with all the advanced strategies imaginable, Warrior Trading is probably your best bet. Despite his eternally happy marketing face, the founder of WT Ross Cameron is a very serious and knowledgeable trader and teacher—and the sheer scope and level of detail in his lessons is ample proof of this.

WT has two main subscription options: Warrior Starter and Warrior Pro. The former membership level will give you a course on the basics of trading, as well as access to a chat room where traders of this community exchange ideas as they work.

The more expensive package, Warrior Pro, gives users access to absolutely everything on the website. This includes a course on swing trading, as well as options, day trading, small-cap trading, etc.—the list is quite extensive and all lessons are top-quality. 

So, the lessons are great and aplenty, the trading community around the course is vibrant and can be very helpful, and students also get a trading simulator app as well as mentorship from WT’s in-house experts should they need any advice. This is all great, but what’s the price?

To be blunt, the price is high. The Warrior Starter package costs $997 for the first month, and renewing the membership from that point is only $197 a month. One the other hand, Warrior Pro, the membership with all the extensive courses costs a whopping $5,997 annually.

So, is Warrior Trading worth it? It depends on what you want: If you’re looking to get very involved in swing trading and maybe branch out to other areas later, then WT is an excellent choice as it gives you all the courses you need plus a community of like-minded individuals. On the other hand, if you want to swing trade in a more casual fashion like most swing traders do, you’ll probably be satisfied with a course that focuses on swing trading and is dramatically cheaper. 

However, Warrior Trading’s reputation was hurt following a recent lawsuit from the FTC over unrealistic claims made in its marketing and advertising.

---

4. Bullish Bears: Best for Beginner Swing Traders

The two aforementioned courses are great, but they cater more to the DIY investor who wants to take a serious dive into swing trading and possibly even explore other strategies. Bullish Bears also has courses on all forms of stock trading but they are more beginner-oriented—both when it comes to pricing and extra features.

The subscription to the website and all its features is only $49 per month, or $300 per year, which is very cheap compared to some advanced courses. Moreover, Bullish Bears offer a few free basic courses as well as a 14-day free trial that you can use to test the service.

Aside from a wide range of lessons on many areas including swing trading, the membership includes access to chat rooms, live trading webinars, as well as trading signals. These resources are great for more casual swing traders who can choose between actively educating themselves (at an affordable price) and just using the trading signals they get to improve their trades right now.

However, Bullish Bears doesn’t offer 1-on-1 mentoring, and the teachers aren’t as involved and ready to give advice to students as they might be in some other premium courses with a significantly higher price tag. All in all, if you’re a beginner who wants to learn the basics and how to swing trade stocks, then Bullish Bears is a fantastic place to get great lessons and become part of an alive trading community without breaking the bank.

---

5. Swing Trading Ninja on Udemy: Best for Forex Swing Trading

We’ve mentioned a few courses that are really good in general or focus on stock trading—but what about forex? Among courses that specifically focus on forex swing trading, Swing Trading Ninja always pops up as one of the best, both when it comes to popularity and user sentiment.

The course casts a wide net over everything a forex trader needs: Specific strategies, chart patterns, when to enter and exit a swing, and how to use swing trading indicators and other handy tools. However, the course isn’t for complete newbies—some basic knowledge about the stock and forex markets, how forex charts work, and technical analysis is required.

But, that isn’t too much of a problem as you can learn the basics of forex trading for free in many places, including beginner-focused forex brokerage platforms. On the other hand, this course is fairly one-dimensional—you get your lessons and you learn. Users can also post comments with questions that the teacher Saad T. Hameed might answer promptly, but there is no 1-on-1 mentorship, chat rooms, or other extra features here.

Students are expected to learn the theory and then practice using a paper trading app for a while before starting to trade with real money. So, there is a lack of features here compared to other courses, but Swing Trading Ninja is far, far more affordable than most—the full course is $90 but all courses on Udemy are almost always at a huge discount, so with a bit of good timing, this one can be bought for as little as $20.

Moreover, this course gives lifetime access to its users, and there’s a 30-day money back guarantee in case they aren’t happy with their purchase. All in all, Swing Trading Ninja will cover most forex swing trading strategies and methods—but turning that theoretical knowledge into practical insight will require a focused solo effort. 

---

6. Zen Trading: Best for Algorithmic Trading

If you’re looking for a swing trading strategy where all you have to do is keep your computer plugged into a power outlet, then algorithmic trading might be your shtick. However, mastering this rapidly-growing form of hi-tech trading isn’t easy as very few courses seriously focus on algo trading—but Zen Trading Strategies is one of those few.

First of all, the course teaches students how to set up and use a number of pre-made automatic trading algorithms that have been designed by a team of experts. These algorithms can be used for strategies that follow trends, spot extreme volume and price increases, and invest in assets that have abnormally high momentum—and this works in all markets including stocks and forex.

These are all common strategies that work in swing trading, as well as more fast-paced forms of trading, but students can also learn how to automate their own strategies. The course also explains how to customize all the parameters of any given strategy, so these algorithms are applicable in swing trading but can also be modified into robots for scalping, day trading, and whatever else.

The service costs $67 per month or $599 yearly, which is not pricey considering the potential that great trading algorithms can have. And, students who are very interested in this field of trading can schedule private 1-on-1 consultations with Zen Trading Strategies’ in-house experts—but this costs $500/hour for a video/phone call and $5,000 for two 5-hour sessions if you want to gaze upon their algorithmic mastery in real life.

All in all, Zen Trading Strategies is a proven solution for automated trading and it has membership levels. The basic membership gives access to a few algos that work, as well as how to modify them—but mentorship and a real master classes on algorithmic trading that can help students make unique, complex, and powerful trading robots are also there, albeit for a premium price tag.

---

7. Udemy: Best Price and Selection of Courses

We already had a course from Udemy above, but this section is devoted to all of the dozens of other swing trading courses on the website. The thing with Udemy is that all courses are on a sale almost all the time, so they are practically very cheap—sometimes they go for as little as $10.

But unlike your regular cheap stuff, these courses are not bad by any stretch of the imagination. Well, some might not be worth everyone’s attention, but some others are hidden life-changing gems that cost pennies. Moreover, the top courses here are no joke as 42 Fortune 100 companies are known for using them to train employees.

Some of the best-sellers in the swing trading category have tens of thousands of happy customers—and we assume they’re happy by the comments they leave and because all courses have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Essentially, you have a month to try each course out before committing your money to it.

However, these courses consist of video lessons, articles, quizzes to test students’ newly-acquired knowledge, but that’s it. Users can ask questions and look at the feedback from other students in the comments section for each lesson, but there is no 1-on-1 mentorship, dedicated chat rooms, webinars, or new content of any sort. It’s just the student, the lessons, and a limited ability to communicate with the teacher.

All in all, a single course on Udemy will probably not do the trick if you’re looking for something to turn you into an intermediate or a pro swing trader. But, when it comes to students looking to learn the basics, expand upon them, and practice without anyone’s help, Udemy will have at least one great swing trading course, as well as a few logical follow-up courses, and all that at a price that won’t make them think twice about breaking the ice and getting started.

---

What Makes Swing Trading Different, Exactly?

Despite its name, swing trading doesn’t involve dancing to a groovy beat. 💃🏽

Rather, it means taking advantage of the markets as they swing up and down, which they do all the time. Every time we have a significant political or economic event, the underlying market volatility will act up and prices will swing, giving traders an opportunity to win or lose. 

Simply put, when the price of something swings down, you buy, and when it swings back up, you sell. Alternatively, when they swing up too much, traders can short sell to make a profit once they swing down again. Simple, right?

Making the right prediction is essential here, but the thing is, this is a medium- to long-term trading strategy. You don’t sit at your computer all day long watching prices like a hawk—swing traders make a few traders every few days, weeks, or even months.

And that’s why people swing trade to make money on the side while working full-time jobs—this form of  trading requires dramatically less time and devotion than day trading and other fast-paced types of investing. And very often, swing trading can be just as profitable, that is, if done right.

In conclusion, swing trading is a more relaxed form of trading where market volatility, which has been consistently high in the past few years for various reasons, is our friend, so to speak. If you don’t know which stocks are going to do well in the next few years, you might as well profit as they go up and down over the course of a month and avoid making a wrong long-term bet.

Also, swing trading is fairly relaxed comparatively, and you can even get help using a top swing trading alert service to help grow your portfolio without sacrificing more of your time and energy than necessary. But, this strategy can also lose you money if you make blind bets—and that’s why a good education is necessary if you want to make smart bets and do so systematically.

What Makes a Good Swing Trading Course?

Trading might just seem like a game of who’s smarter, but it is much more than that. We’re all human, and even if something seems like a rational thing to do, we simply can’t keep a cool head when money is involved—and this is the case for everyone, newbies and expert traders alike.

What’s more, the internet is a sea of information, and a lot of it is complete nonsense made to get you excited and sell you an unrealistic dream for a high price. The rise of extremely superficial investment advice on TikTok and other social media is just one example of this—someone presents themself as an expert investor and sells you a stock or forex market “cheat code” which turns out to be a gamble that loses you money.

That’s why getting a proper education is crucial—not just because it makes you better at trading, but also because it helps you tell real opportunities from financial pipe dreams. Fact: The number of traders has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic started, and a huge number of them are beginners with little to no trading knowledge who’ve been losing more than they’ve been earning.

That’s why a good course can give a new trader a huge edge in this day and age. But many courses aren’t worth nearly as much money as they cost, so here are some criteria you can use to make sure that what you’re buying is the real thing, and not just another passing fad. And lastly, there’s also the problem of fraud common in the forex markets that everyone can avoid by getting proper guidance.

A Legitimate Teacher 👨‍🏫

It is easy to talk about trading online, but it is a completely different thing to be very successful at it—and only very successful traders should teach their skills to others, no? Naturally, the first thing we need to look at when determining if a course is worth its salt is the teacher who made it and is marketing it.

Do they have many years of experience? Have they helped hundreds or even thousands of investors with their careers? Are they promising something realistic or are they trying to excite their customers with a promise of 100%+ annual returns? 💷

The face of the course should be a person who has skin in the game. Someone who is successful and has a solid reputation as a teacher and a trading expert can’t risk selling you a bad product because word will get around and they will lose the trust of their students—and that’s fatal for any such business.

So, before buying anything, ‘stalk’ the teacher online for a while. If they’ve been doing a good job for years, it is very likely that they will keep at it and that they will strive to give you the best education possible to further their own goals, as well as yours. Of course, a brand new teacher might be just as good, but you can’t know for sure—so it’s usually much safer to stick with someone who’s been tried and tested.

Lessons Everyone Can Understand 📖

Like engineering, programming, and other things that pay well nowadays, finance is notorious for having a lot of technical lingo. What’s more, once a new trader gets past the basics, there’s even more complicated terminology paired with fairly complex analysis methods and strategies—all in all, this can be a handful for beginners.

But let us tell you from experience that all of this looks far scarier on the surface than it really is. The trading course you get should have the same idea—trading can be explained in a simple, yet comprehensive way, and you should definitely choose a teacher whocan be understood easily.

Moreover, much of swing trading is about recognizing price patterns by identifying major indicators found in swing trading—and you have to learn these through examples, and lots of them. Otherwise, you’ll have knowledge that is not supported by experience—the number of retail traders has doubled over the past few years and many of these newcomers have and are still paying for their inexperience. 

So, always choose a course with understandable lessons, examples, and a workflow that makes sense. Some courses offer free trial periods and for others, you should ask around and see if other students are happy with their teacher’s approach.

An Involved Teaching Method 👨‍💻

Why not just buy a book? There are plenty of books about trading out there, so why are courses the more popular option?

Well, video courses aren’t better because of their content. The knowledge, examples, and tips you can get from a modern course are very similar to what you’ll find in a good book. Sure, video is much more engaging than looking at paper, but that’s not the main advantage online trading courses have.

Actually, the main advantage of some online courses is that they are interactive. Aside from a list of video lessons, a course often comes with 1-on-1 mentorship, chat rooms where students and teachers exchange ideas, and other such tools.

In other words, if you don’t understand something 100%, you can ask questions and they will be answered for you. What’s more, being part of a living, breathing community of sorts will make your education more engaging and trading will seem more like an organic part of your life than some robotic past-time activity. 🤖

All in all, when looking at courses, look at what extra features they offer. If you get a mentor and access to a trading forum and maybe even webinars where pro traders work in real-time and explain everything as they go, that’s a huge benefit. Popular public forums might be a hotspot of interesting events like the GME short squeeze, but a closed and moderated community of supportive traders is a safer source of info.

Because of this and a few other reasons, interactive courses usually cost more but they are a better option for inspired students than a simple video library with lessons—or a book for that matter.

The Course is a Good Fit for You 🌟

Two questions: What do you want and what can you realistically get?

Well, we all want to gain a lot from trading, naturally, but we all have our circumstances. One can only devote so much time and money to swing trading, and that’s usually not enough to make all your financial dreams come true. At least, not quickly.

To make the most of our efforts, we should pick a course that focuses on what we want and can do. For example, some high-end courses focus on really advanced day trading strategies that require you to spend 8 hours a day at your computer and to have tens of thousands of dollars on your trading balance at all times. ⏲ If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s recommended to review the top courses for day trading in order to get an understanding of the resources that are available.

However, most of us want something we need to spend a couple of hours each day on at most—and we don’t have a casual $25 grand laying around at all times. 

One more thing to consider is your preferred market. Some courses focus on stocks, some on penny stocks, and some on forex trading. Risky stocks can be very profitable, whereas forex is all about catching very small price swings and making steady small profits. 

Before enrolling in a course, all of this needs to be considered—otherwise, you can end up stuck listening to lessons about something you don’t like and that doesn’t fit with your lifestyle at all. You need to be realistic and do what works for you, and not what worked (supposedly) for some trading guru with a fancy car on Instagram. That way, you will get the best bang for your buck for any course you start.

“Real” Trading Experience 📚

Knowledge without experience is like a boat on land—you have to push it very hard to get it to move, and no one wants to push a boat on land (although it would probably make for a good glute workout 🏋️). Therefore, experience is crucial, especially when it comes to trading without worry, and crippling self-doubt.

Now, we need to trade for real to get that true nitty-gritty experience, but a good course can be of huge help as well. Namely, the best courses provide tons of examples for everything and they teach students how to use a demo brokerage account to practice their skills before risking real money.

Moreover, live webinars where pro traders do their work as they explain what they’re thinking are extremely handy because their experience can rub off on you. And, a big part of that experience is the psychology found in trading—with real cash on the line, trading becomes a very emotional game, and a swing trading course should prepare you for the potential money-induced stresses.

And finally, there’s also the effect that the whole community around the course will leave on you. People learn from their mistakes, but wise people learn from the mistakes of others—and a lively chat room can help you do just that. All in all, a course won’t give you real experience per se, but as a simulation, it should give you a broad, stable foundation you can build on.

What You Can Expect to Learn from a Swing Trading Course 🤓

Unfortunately, you won’t learn how to sway to the sound of hot jazz with these courses. 🎷

But, you will learn a number of other things. And, when all of these things are combined, you get something called “swing trading”—and each of the components of this aggregate of knowledge is equally important, so let’s see what they are.

The Basics 📝

You’d think that a stock trader would know how the stock market functions. Most traders do know this as well as some other basic info that is relevant in all forms of trading and investing. For example, reading stock charts, analyzing companies and currencies, and even hedging trades in forex are all skills that can be considered fundamental for traders.

Fundamental Analysis 🧮

You can’t spell fundamental analysis without “fun.” Well, you also can’t spell it without “mental,” but for the sake of having a positive-sounding play on words in this article, let’s talk about how interesting this part of swing trading can be.

As a key skill for stock trading, fundamental analysis means researching a company by looking at public info and news. Does the company have its finances in order or is it deep in debt? What new products are they developing? Do they have good leadership? Are they better than the competition in some areas?

Unless you’re a congressperson—many of whom have suspiciously good insight into what will happen in the markets in the near future—you need to rely on public information to get an idea of what stocks to invest in. This can also be done in forex trading, as you can research a country to see the fundamentals of its currency and see if its central bank is making any significant policies as was the case in Russia when the RUB lost a lot of its value in 2022. 💱

All in all, this form of analysis will give you an idea of an asset’s fundamental characteristics, which you can use to compare it to other assets or the market average. The thing is, there are dozens of fundamental analysis methods—some of which are very complex—and a course should teach this to you.

When looking at a course, see how much of their lessons they devote to fundamental analysis. If it’s a couple of 10-minute video lessons, you can rest assured you won’t learn much. So, always look at what your course will tell you about how to analyze fundamentals because lacking in this area will very likely make your long-term predictions weaker.

Finding Patterns and Making Strategies 🔍

Unlike fundamental analysis, which is more focused on the medium to long term, technical analysis focuses on finding patterns in price charts and predicting price movements. Essentially, this means looking at indicators and the shape of price lines to see what a probable future outcome of a market is, and then making a safer or riskier strategy for betting on that outcome.

This kind of technical analysis can be used for making long-term plans, but is much more utilized for predicting short- to medium-term trends—which is why it has a big place in swing trading. For example, finding an easy-to-spot death cross pattern using a moving average indicator is fairly simple and means that there’s a high probability that the price of an asset will drop significantly.

This is all that technical analysis can really do—it can tell you that something is more probable than something else. However, it is up to you how you’ll approach this information.

And this is what a good course should teach you: How to find probable opportunities, how to make a long-term strategy using these probabilities, and how to hedge against losses in case the odds go against your favor.

Again, when selecting a course, look at how much time they devote to various aspects of technical analysis. This should be a very large chunk of any swing trading course, and is especially important when it comes to trading forex, volatile small-cap stocks, and even cryptocurrency.

Budgeting and Trading Psychology 💰

All traders lose money but the best traders win more than they lose. Now, this is simple enough to understand, but in practice, it is very counter-intuitive. This is because every time we lose, we want to make up for those losses ASAP—and this means that traders want to make riskier traders to get their money back every time they lose.

However, retaliating at the markets is a very bad idea. Aside from telling you how to spot and use a trading opportunity, a course should teach you how to manage your trading balance. For example, if you place 7 trades per month, as long as you make a profit on most of them (and an overall profit), you’re doing great. 

Similarly, if you make 84 trades per year, not all of them have to be right. Sometimes, a swing trader will keep losing money for months but make up for those losses and then some over the course of a whole year—this is common when the market rallies after a bearish period.

However, although this is logical enough, we’re all humans and tend to go nuts when we lose money for any reason—and this leads to reckless trading decisions that can be extremely costly. That’s why a swing trading course should teach you how to make plans with your trading balance and warn you about the pitfalls that your own fear and greed can drive you into.

What to Keep in Mind Before Buying a Swing Trading Course 🤔

Marketing can convince us of anything, and the way most courses are advertised, they can give customers an idealized or flat-out wrong idea of what a swing trading course can give them. Even if a course is completely legit and very honest, it won’t speak about the risks and difficulties of swing trading in its ads—but we will.

Some courses may be misleading, some are good ol’ beginner courses with the price tag of a new Benz, and some might be legit but don’t look it in their commercials. Let’s see how to distinguish between courses and how to avoid jumping into swing trading unaware of its many challenges.

Gold-Painted Lead ⚠

As we’ve mentioned earlier, there are quite a few great free sources of education online for swing traders and investors. So naturally, a lot of web “entrepreneurs” often get an idea to take these free lessons, repackage them as their own, and sell them at an obscene price.

Needless to say, signing up for such a course is a waste of money. First of all, you can get the same thing for free. Second of all, with unique paid courses, the teachers have far, far more incentive to make an effort and create a course that’s comprehensive, easy to follow, and overall much more insightful than most free sources of info.

So before buying anything, take a look at the list of lessons and topics that will be covered in the course. If the course has too few lessons and only focuses on the basics, it doesn’t deserve a high price. On the other hand, if it only costs a few bucks or so, it might be worth it—even if it’s just a bundle of free lessons glued together if the course is structured well, it might be worth relinquishing a few beers worth of money. Just watch out when a cheap course tries to upsell you something.

Something That’s Not for You 🕵️‍♂️

When we think of dangerous professions that make your heart race we usually come up with things like being a firefighter, catching crabs off the coast of Alaska, or roofing during the middle of July as a redhead. Needless to say, some people are way, way more suited for these jobs than others.

Something similar exists in trading. For example, around the world, there are quite a few forex day traders who work 8 hours a day, constantly researching, making trades with 100:1 leverage, and so on. On the other hand, there are many more casual swing traders who just make 3-4 trades per month and use stock picking services to avoid having to do all of their research themselves.

Before you even start a course, you need to figure out where you fall between these two extremes. Both options can be profitable and unprofitable—that depends on how you approach them and how well they fit your lifestyle. ⚖

Think about how swing trading can fit into your life and choose your course and trading strategy appropriately. If you take on a very active strategy as someone who really has an hour or two at most after work before their brain is fried, all you’ll end up with is a headache, losses that are greater than your profits, and a feeling that you’ve done something wrong.

Don’t overextend yourself and make an unrealistic trading schedule with high expectations. It is better to start slow and steadily increase your trading frequency as you go—and even get some help in the form of stock alerts. And finally, look at multiple courses and select one that fits your regime best in terms of the markets they focus on, the time required, and the general complexity of its strategies.

Free Education with a Broker 💸

Capitalism has its flaws, but one good thing about it is that you can usually trust in other people’s financial self-interest. And when it comes to liking money, no one is a better example than brokers.

Nowadays, most stock trading apps give you easy access to various markets but many of them also offer a number of educational resources. In certain cases, these include libraries of video lessons, trading examples, webinars, etc.—and this is almost always free for clients.

But you might ask yourself: How come this is free when dedicated trading courses aren’t? First of all, a top-notch swing trading course is definitely a better source of info than any broker’s free course. Second of all—financial self-interest.

Many brokers make money based on how successfully their clients trade, so they want to make sure that their users are as capable as possible. So, if you’re just looking for a good basic course to get you started before you go ahead and buy anything, you can sign up with a broker with a focus on education like TD Ameritrade and get your intro to trading for free.

A Course Won’t Prepare You for the Real Thing 🧐

When the stock market starts crashing and you wake up to see that all your positions are redder than a very angry tomato, the first instinctive reaction you’ll have is: Sell, run away, hide until everything blows over. And this is what most investors do during bad times.

Of course, this is probably one of the worst decisions you can make in such a scenario. The smart, cool-headed course of action would be: Don’t sell, wait for your stocks to rally as they always do, and possibly buy more while prices are low even if it means trading on margin. 

We mention this because trading with real money makes it hard to think straight sometimes—literally—and no amount of lessons and trading simulations with virtual funds can prepare you for this. This means that even if you’re the best student ever and you grasp everything your trading course throws at you, you might still turn out to be a lacking trader if you’re not aware of your emotions.

Some courses will try to prepare you with lessons on trading psychology, but in reality, this is the aspect of trading that probably requires the most practice. So if you’re a newcomer, try to make a logical, calculated plan before you start trading and stick to it even if fear and greed tell you otherwise—no course can do this for you, so you have to.

Prepare for Losses 💆‍♂️

Trading is like a game of professional basketball in a sense. The point isn’t to prevent the opponent from scoring at any cost—it is to score more than they did. As long as you’re ahead before the whistle blows, you win.

Similarly, it doesn’t really matter how high your losses are in swing trading—what matters is that your gains are bigger overall. You will start losing sooner or later and when you do, don’t panic, don’t blame the course for giving you unreliable strategies—all strategies are only there to improve your odds of winning, but nothing more.

So always play the long game—keep a record of your wins and losses and make it your mission to increase your monthly or yearly win/loss ratio. Keep in mind that even if you take the best course ever, the strategies you’ve learned might seem ineffective—but give them time, refine them, and stick to your plan. As long as they work over a longer period, they work.

Conclusion 🏁

Learning how to swing trade is a very straightforward process if you get a good course—but as we can see, courses not only vary in quality, but are drastically different in the way they teach students.

Courses like Investors Underground and Warrior Trading are very comprehensive and are surrounded by a community of traders who exchange ideas and help each other. What’s more, they offer special features like personal mentorship and live trading webinars, so they are best for students who aspire to become real pro traders and want to be very involved in their trading enterprise—but these courses are also the most expensive by far.

On the other hand there are courses like Bullish Bears and Swing Trading Ninja that are dramatically cheaper and offer a similar level of education—but don’t give users the opportunity to engage with the community and teachers as much. These courses are very well-suited for relative newcomers who don’t see themselves as pro traders yet and don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for their first trading course.

And lastly, swing traders who want to set up algorithms instead of making every trade manually can learn to do so with Zen Trading Strategies. And, Udemy is just a library with dozens of cheap courses on any topic, so it’s a great place to visit if you want to browse through your options before buying.