Swing trading: Where's the line between doing research and just getting lucky?

I'm new to the stock market and have been doing some reading over the last few weeks in order to learn more about it. I want to get into swing trading, but there are two main things that I've heard over and over again that seem to conflict with each other:

• "Spend a lot of time doing research on a stock before trading it."
• "You never know what the market is going to do -- it's really just a gamble."

So my question is, why do all this research if trading stocks is just a gamble anyway? I get that some stocks are obviously way better than others, especially bluechip stocks, but even those can fluctuate wildly from day to day and week to week it seems.

To me, it seems that you can really only do so much research on a stock before it starts to become counterproductive. since the market is unpredictable anyway. Might as well throw a dart at a wall of stocks to pick one, then do your best to buy low and sell high.

Maybe I'm missing something, so I'd love to hear any insight on this and what your strategies are for swing trading.

Submitted March 02, 2018 at 11:48AM by Crrrrraig http://ift.tt/2oND9dg