Two basic trading styles

Two basic stock trading strategies are used by most traders.

1 High expectancy Low frequency

2 Low expectancy High Frequency

High Expectancy Low frequency

In this style traders look for big moves and infrequent trades. Buy and hold is an ultimate High Expectancy and Low Frequency strategy.

Trend following strategies fall in this category.

Part of the IBD strategy which focuses on holding big stocks for long term moves falls here.

These kinds of strategies were very popular till ten years ago.

One of the drawbacks of such strategies is large drwadowns.

To trade such strategies you need extremely high skill. Unless you are very right on your infrequent trades you can have hit or miss years.

Low expectancy High Frequency

In this style traders look for small but frequent moves.

Swing trading, day trading, high frequency trading, quant strategies are primarily focused on this.

In last 10 years these strategies have become very popular and widely used.

Transaction costs have dropped dramatically in last 10 years. When I started trading a trade used to cost 39 dollars one way. Now you can do a round trade for around 1 to 10 dollars.

Large scale use of quant techniques have also contributed to this.

All factors being same it is easier to forecast a next small move than to forecast a large move.

Trader can decide to use either of the approach and make money and lots of money. Day traders using high frequency trading make millions and same way a low frequency trader who catches biggest move in a year can make millions.

But the important caveat is that to do both you need very high degree of skill or market understanding on your chosen holding period.

Depending on your choice of strategy your development path will be different.

No matter which approach you use unless you have high self efficacy beliefs for that task and develop procedural memory for that task you will not be able to make money.

Those are basic psychological constrains.