Depends on what you define as short term. I agree, day trading...

Depends on what you define as short term. I agree, day trading is almost always gambling. Very few people understand it to a level of actually profiting from it and no one has the time or money to waste on learning how to do that lol.

Swing trading, where your maybe involved in a stock for a few weeks or months, has been highly successful for me and hasn't cost me too much in the beginning of when I started. I'd actually go as far as to say that it is safer than long term investing. The reason I say that is, as many people (myself included) can attest to, seeing a company that 'should' become profitable but actually ends up a train wreck can wipe out someone's portfolio even though everything said that it would make them money when their balls deep into it. Be that because of poor management, poor circumstances that have negatively affected the company or other reasons the company wasn't able to live up to shareholder's expectations. All this time where you've put so much money behind a company where you're profit is in the negatives for years before you start reaping the rewards (hopefully). Swing trading on the other hand, isn't affected by this as much by the nature of how you invest and how long your in the trade for.

Typically I use a lot less money in swing trades compared to if I were balls deep in investing hoping to become a gazillionaire. The risk is therefore lower and the attachment to the money itself is more rational and less emotional. Just wait for the right time to enter the market through technical analysis of looking for either trends, psychological support lines, times of high volume etc. Prior to entering the trade, identify a price to pull out of and make sure you don't get greedy and try to change your mindset every day. Sure, there are times when the stock will dip like what we saw with PEN but to reverse that situation and still be profitable, investing more into the dip can lead to gains even though your first investment is negative. Example being that I bought at 0.1, 0.091 and 0.081 and the amount of shares increased in each investment to where the average buy price was 0.087. Pulling out at 0.096 gave me a net profit of 10% of my initial capital without having to worry about the stock rising above the psychological boundary, 0.1.

To me, long term investing is similar to gambling because, even though all the evidence may suggest that the company will become profitable, there's always risk involved that could crash the company.