A position opened on Tuesday is still open on Friday. Between one close and the next open, nothing you do changes it. No order fills, no stop triggers, and the price that starts the next session is set by everyone else. Multi-day position rules exist to make that stretch survivable, and they differ from the rules a day trader uses.
What a swing trading strategy has to specify
A strategy is the set of decisions you make before the trade, written down. There are four: what puts a symbol on your list, where you enter, where you exit if you are wrong, and where you exit if you are right.
Leave one of them unwritten and you decide it while the position is open.
The holding period follows from the exits rather than the other way round. Swing trades run days to weeks because the rules that close them, a moving average cross, a target price, a stop, take that long to be reached on a daily chart.
Momentum and mean reversion swing trading strategies
Momentum rules buy a price that is already rising and exit when it stops rising. Mean reversion rules buy a price that has moved a long way from its own average and exit when it returns to that average. The two are opposites by construction: the chart that triggers one is the chart the other is waiting to fade.
A momentum rule still has to pick its entry, and there are two common forms. One enters on the strength itself, as the price crosses a level such as the 52-week high. The other waits for that break and then enters on the first pullback to a moving average. They differ in what they trade off: the first takes the entry it can see, the second takes a shorter stop distance and accepts that some breakouts never pull back.
The parameters are conventions, not facts. The 30 level as an oversold reading is a convention. J. Welles Wilder introduced the Relative Strength Index in "New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems" in 1978, along with the Average True Range and the Average Directional Index (TradingView Help Center). The 20-day moving average as a mean reversion target is a default. Both are numbers you pick, and both can be checked against your own closed trades later.
Whichever family you run, attach it to the trade when you open it. The trade form has a Strategy field listing your saved strategies, reading "No Strategy" until you pick one. That link is what lets the app group your results by strategy afterwards.
Overnight risk management in swing trading
The gap between one close and the next open is the risk only multi-day positions carry. A stop order does not execute while the market is shut. If a results announcement, a downgrade or an index change lands after the close, the first price you can trade is the opening print, and it can sit well below your stop.
Two things follow. Your loss is not capped by the stop distance, only usually limited by it. And a position held over a scheduled event carries a different risk from the same position held over an ordinary night.
Swingfolio records what your own positions did overnight. Open a trade and the Market tab holds an Overnight Gaps panel. It shows a card for the entry day, then a line reading "Holding Period (4 gaps)" above three counts labelled favorable, adverse and flat. Each count is measured against the direction you were positioned in. It is a record of the gaps you sat through on that trade. It does not forecast the next one, and it holds nothing about a symbol you have never traded.
Stop distance for a multi-day hold
A stop placed inside the instrument's ordinary daily range is reached by ordinary movement. Nothing has to go wrong for it to fill.
The Average True Range measures that ordinary movement. Wilder introduced it in the same 1978 book. It averages the true range, and the true range is the largest of three numbers. Those are the current high minus the current low, the absolute value of the high minus the previous close, and the absolute value of the low minus the previous close (TradingView Help Center). Gaps sit inside that measure, which is why it gets used for stops on overnight positions.
Setting the stop at a multiple of ATR is a convention you size to your own tolerance. On a stock with a 14-day ATR of $0.60 entered at $20.00, a 2 x ATR stop sits at $18.80 and a 1.5 x ATR stop at $19.10. What the multiple buys you is a stop that scales with the instrument instead of with your account balance.
Position sizing and portfolio heat
Risk per trade is a percentage you choose. Risking 1% of a $50,000 account is $500. Enter at $20.00 with the stop at $18.50 and the risk per unit is $1.50, so $500 / $1.50 = 333 units, costing 333 x $20.00 = $6,660. The stop distance sets the size; the account balance only sets the dollar risk.
The win rate you need follows from the same arithmetic. At a reward to risk of 2:1, breakeven win rate = 1 / (1 + 2) = 33.3%. Win 40% of the time with winners twice the size of losers and the average trade is 0.40 x 2R - 0.60 x 1R = +0.2R. That is a statement about those inputs, not a forecast, and it holds only while the winners reach 2R.
The public position size calculator does the arithmetic for you. Fill in Entry Price, Stop Loss Price, Account Value and Risk Percentage, and the Your Position Size card prints a share count above Investment Amount, Risk Amount and Stop Loss Distance. Add a Target Price and it adds Potential Reward and Risk:Reward Ratio.
Inside the app, the trade form prints no share count. As you fill it in, it shows four figures: Exp. Risk, Exp. Reward, R:R Ratio written as "1 : 2.50", and Port. Risk as a percentage of your portfolio value. Above 5%, a line appears under them reading "Risk exceeds 5% of portfolio value".
Open positions add up. Five positions each risking 1% put 5% of the account at risk if every stop fills at its stop price. The dashboard carries that total as a Portfolio Heat tile: total risk across open positions divided by portfolio value. Its gauge reads Risk Under Control below 6%, Elevated Risk from 6%, and "Excessive Risk!" from 10%. The total counts each position separately, so if two of them respond to the same news, it understates what one event can cost you.
Reviewing your own multi-day positions
Your memory of a month of trades is shorter than the record of it. Two screens read the record for you.
On the Analytics page, the Behavioral tab holds a Revenge Trading card, computed from your closed trades by two rules. A trade is flagged when its position size is more than 50% larger than that of a losing trade which closed on the same day or in the two days before. It is also flagged when you entered it on the day a loss closed and at least two other trades were entered that same day. The card prints the count, the percentage of trades in the period, and the cost when the flagged trades lost money overall. Below those it lists up to three flagged trades, each with a reason such as "Multiple trades entered same day as loss". Arithmetic over your own trade records produces that number, not the AI. The tab stays empty until at least one closed trade carries an emotion, a rule tick or a reflection tag.
The AI review is a separate thing, and it runs when you ask for it. In AI Insights, the Reviews tab has a period selector and one Generate Review button. What comes back is a card with a Summary, a Best Trade and Worst Trade, and Action Items. Nothing generates on a schedule.
Neither screen records why you took the trade. The numbers say what happened; a note written at the time says what you were reasoning from. The trade form has a Notes section for exactly that, with the placeholder "Trade thesis, market conditions, observations...". Keeping both is what lets you separate a sound decision that lost money from a poor one that made some.
Trading Australian and US listings from one account
The ASX and the US exchanges trade in different hours, so you can hold positions in both without watching either live. Every rule in this article is evaluated on daily bars, which means end of day prices are enough to run it.
What changes with a second market is the record keeping. A trade in a foreign currency needs the exchange rate that applied to it, and the tax rules that apply to you follow your own jurisdiction rather than the exchange you traded on.
The tax records a year of swing trading leaves
The Tax Report page reports the trades you closed inside a tax year. With the Australian jurisdiction selected, its subtitle reads "Australian Capital Gains Tax (CGT)". The tiles across the top read Capital Gains, Capital Losses, Net Position and Taxable Capital Gain, and the year selector runs on the financial year. A Trade Breakdown card lists the closed trades behind those totals, under tabs reading All Trades, Short-term (≤12 months) and Long-term (CGT Discount). Above the report, an Australian account also gets two view tabs, Tax Report and MyTax Fields. With the US jurisdiction the subtitle reads "US Capital Gains" and the fourth tile becomes Net Capital Gain/Loss, the figure after wash sale adjustments.
Holding period decides one Australian rule. The ATO's 50% CGT discount applies when "you owned the asset for at least 12 months" and you are an Australian resident for tax purposes. Both the day of acquisition and the day of the CGT event are excluded from that count (ATO, CGT discount). A position held for days or weeks does not reach 12 months, so the discount is not part of a swing trading plan.
The page reports what your records contain. It files nothing on your behalf. This article is general information and not tax advice.
Where multi-day position rules break down
Three failures, in the order they cost the most.
The first is reclassifying a trade. A swing position that passes its stop and becomes a long-term holding is a position with no exit rule at all, and your capital stays inside it.
The second is moving the stop down after entry. The stop was the number that set your position size, so moving it invalidates the size as well as the exit.
The third is trading a setup you have no rule for. Nothing requires you to hold a position this week.
A 30-day plan for these swing trading rules
Adapt the numbers below. They are placeholders, not recommendations.
- Write one strategy's four decisions and save it under Strategies, so it appears in the trade form's Strategy list.
- Size every entry from the stop before you place the order, using one risk percentage you keep for the month.
- Attach the strategy to every trade you open.
- At the end of the month, open that strategy and read its Performance Overview tab. The Strategy Comparison table there has rows for Total P/L, Win Rate, Avg. R-Multiple and Trade Count, with an Equity Curve and an R-Multiple Distribution below it.
Thirty days of that produces a sample, not a verdict. What it does produce is a set of trades that all followed the same written rules, which is the only kind of sample worth reading.
Write your four decisions tonight, then open Swingfolio and save them as a strategy so the next trade is counted under it. Start the 30-day trial if you do not have an account yet.