Day Trading vs. Swing Trading

[Stark]

Can you give an example of how you research swing trading stocks and determine when to buy/sell?


I wrote a computer program in college that went through all S&P 500 stock history (d/led it from Yahoo) and bought every stock that was on a significant downswing/upswing and sold/bought back after it either went up or down 7% (gain or loss) or had a positive swing after x number of days (we tried different amounts of days ranging from 2-14). The exact strategy was to see if a stock went up 10% or down 10% and then buy/short sell once it started to reverse direction on a close day of more than .5%. Lame strategy yes, but it was fun to program and see how it worked out. And basically I have an open ended program where I can test strategies... so if your strategy is mathmatical at all, I'd like to test it out historically.