To make money off less frequent trades I believe (again, just my opinion) that your decisions must be based on news/insight/insider info, not charting patterns. In other words, more fundamentals. And that's much harder to automate.
Of course, you will find people that tell you the opposite and that they make money. My response to this would be: Of course there are those that make money due to simple laws of probability. With a lot of people trading there will be some winners. But it is mostly due to luck rather than skill. And the fewer trades your make (lower frequency) the harder it is to assign any kind of significance numbers to the results.