Strategies

How to Choose a Strategy Based on Your Profile

Astron Team · 09/24/2026 · 6 min read

Before choosing which trading strategy to follow, most people ask the wrong question. Instead of asking "which strategy performs best", the question that really matters is "which strategy fits my routine, my capital, and how I handle loss". A strategy that's excellent on paper can be unworkable for someone who works eight hours a day away from the computer, and a simple strategy can work very well for someone with the discipline to follow it every day.

This is the first step of a two-part guide. Here you'll build your trader profile before choosing any method; in the second part, the focus shifts to testing, adjusting, and validating the chosen strategy in practice.

How much time do you actually have available

Available time is the first filter, and the most overlooked one. Scalping or day trading strategies demand continuous attention during the session, often watching the chart for hours on end. Swing trading strategies, which keep positions open for a few days, or position trading, which lasts weeks or months, require less screen time and more patience to let the move develop.

Be honest about your actual routine, not the routine you'd like to have. Someone who can only check the market at night, for example, tends to have more consistency with longer-term strategies than trying to trade minute charts outside the hours of highest liquidity.

What is your real risk tolerance

Risk tolerance isn't what a person thinks they can handle, it's what they actually handle when the loss shows up on the screen. A practical way to measure this is to think of a loss amount that, if it happened today, wouldn't change your night's sleep or your financial decisions for the month. If that amount is R$ 50, the size of your trades and the number of simultaneous trades need to be calculated around that limit, not the limit the strategy would "require" to perform better.

More aggressive strategies, with high leverage or many trades open at once, fit those with higher risk tolerance and the financial cushion for it. More conservative strategies, with smaller positions and fewer simultaneous trades, fit beginners or those with less room to absorb losses.

How much capital you have to trade with

The available capital also defines what type of strategy is viable. With R$ 500, for example, trading several assets at once with meaningful positions isn't realistic, because each trade ends up either too small to generate a result or too large relative to the total capital. In that case, it makes more sense to focus effort on one or two familiar assets and apply a fixed amount per trade, like 2% of capital, which in this example equals R$ 10 per entry.

With larger capital, diversifying across strategies and assets becomes possible, but the principle stays the same: the size of each position should be a small, consistent fraction of the total, not an amount decided in the heat of the moment.

Your personality matters too

Two people can have the same available time and the same capital and still need different strategies, because they react differently to waiting and to loss. Someone who gets anxious watching a position stay open for days tends to close swing trades too early, on impulse. Someone who gets stressed by quick decisions tends to make mistakes in day trading strategies, precisely because of the short-time pressure.

Recognizing this behavior pattern is just as important as understanding the strategy's technical method. A strategy only works if the person can execute it the same way, trade after trade, even on days when the result doesn't come.

By the end of this step, you should be able to answer three questions clearly: how much time per day you'll dedicate to the market, what loss amount you accept without affecting the rest of your financial life, and what kind of waiting or pressure fits your temperament. With these answers in hand, choosing between scalping, day trading, swing trading, or position trading stops being a guess and becomes a decision based on your own profile, whether you're trading stocks, currencies, or indices on platforms like Astron. In the second part of this guide, these answers become the basis for testing the chosen strategy before trading with meaningful capital.