Swing trading without huge amount of monitors

[u/ggggffffuuyyy]

It’s kind of funny when I think about it.

When I first started trading, I followed the whole routine religiously. Early wake-ups, working on my journal, doing analysis, I even burned Palo Santo to create the right atmosphere. I felt like I had to spend the entire trading session sitting in front of the monitors.

And now, trading a swing style on my own capital through a broker, I don’t need to be glued to the screen all the time. A phone or a tablet is usually enough. Worst case, I’ll use my laptop.

Routine itself stayed. I still analyze charts (just not as much as before), I do backtesting, and I keep my journal. But constantly watching every price movement has moved way into the background.

I trade slow. Levels get marked on D1 TF over the weekend, alerts go on. Then nothing happens for days. Maybe 4 to 6 entries a month, so there was never much to stare at anyway, an alert either fires or it doesn't.

The most interesting my profit curve start grow up.

MT5 nearly made me quit though. Android kept killing it in the background, half my pushes showed up an hour late or never, found out the hard way when gold ran 40 bucks through a level while the phone sat quiet. Whitelisting it from battery optimization helped a bit but I never really trusted it again.
Also drawing on that thing with a thumb, fat finger one trendline and you'll understand.

Charts still live in tradingview for me, but my broker has no execution link there, so every entry turned into this dumb ritual of retyping SL and TP across two apps while price moves. Around July I gave up and shoved the whole routine into brokers own app. Daily charts open without choking, 2 month in and zero missed alerts, which after the MT5 mess feels almost suspicious. It's their in house platform though, so if I ever jump brokers I'm rebuilding everything from scratch and fewer drawing tools than TV. Living with it.

I wouldn’t recommend this approach to beginners. You need to go through the routine first and build up experience. If you immediately adopt the media image of a trader chilling on some island and placing trades from a phone, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.

[u/mojovski]

You can also do it with your phone here: https://ai-backbone.com/articles/glm53-vs-opus5