Took me 7 years to get profitable in scalping and another 7 years to get losing days to one every other month. Was it worth it? Hell no is my opinion. I wish I had spent enormous amount of time into learning hedging and options, which would have taken less time. Most of my profits in my life has come from long term commodity trading and last two years have done well swinging/longer term option selling.
When I scalped, never used stops to exit, average time of trade was 63 seconds max, risked approx 5 points and targets were 1-3 ticks in ES, do up to 300 trades a day, averaged down on every trade. I traded off charts using Bollinger bands, sma, reversion to mean, buy/sell support/resistance. Worked long at developing patterns not written in books and kept tons of stats, stats, stats, stats, stats.
If there in am ounce of laziness within you, you won't make it. Have to be comfortable at thinking outside the box. Have to be comfortable hearing "it can't be done" by the masses, find a way to overcome.
I never advise to scalp or day trading, learn swing trading/hedging, better to make smaller profits and seldom lose than swing for fences.
Am too old to scalp any more, hands shake and losing memory, time catches all of us.
