up $30 swing trading forex after a couple of days.

I think I've figured out that swing trading forex is the way to go for me, using daily charts just like they were stocks.

intraday trading takes too large a movement to make a difference, and this way I can have multiple positions. Right now I'm long the Canadian Dollar, Swiss franc and the Yen and short the Euro and the Australian Dollar. You also have to give currency very wide stops, it can swing 50 pips on you just to move in a short term trading range.

Fortunately, I learned that you can trade very tiny amounts of currency -- $1000 worth at a time at a trade cost of $20 (50 to 1 leverage). I'm trading $2,000 chunks at this point, which make for $20 per 100 pip move at a trade cost of $40 per trade. I have 5 positions, so that's $200 in capital. Compare that to thousands on a stock for the same kind of movement! A currency might move several hundred pips in a week, so this is enough to call it a real trade without having to allocate too much to it. If 4 of the 5 trades moved 100 pips in a week that could be $60 profit, or 30% return on capital. If 3 out of 5 are winners that's $20, or 10% of capital.

As with day trading this is something that is easy to scale. I've got $3,000 set aside for this because I thought I would be buying $100,000 at a time (for a cost of $2,000) but I have $200 at risk right now. If this is a winner I'll play with the houses money, scaling up and down based on the amount that I profit or lose.

This feels settled, I like that. I'm attracted to currencies because you can get in with a small dollar amount and still get a profit and they don't correlate to the S&P, although right now the Euro is driving a lot, but generally speaking they move on their own. That means I'm not 100% correlated in one direction and can have a mixture of longs and shorts.