Yes, I can see that from your screenshots. But everybody has to start somewhere. Here is some help, for the beginning:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/073015/how-do-futures-contracts-roll-over.asp
Is scalping still profitable?
- Thread starter qlai
- Start date
Yes, I can see that from your screenshots. But everybody has to start somewhere. Here is some help, for the beginning:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/073015/how-do-futures-contracts-roll-over.asp
Cool, thank you.
How does one scalp FX? I mean there is no volume, order book, or even "official" data feed. Do you trade price action? I'm not being sarcastic, was always wandering.
With bigger price movements, you can easily get 1.5 - 3 points on ES. I call that scalping. If you are going for less than that, you need to be one of those AI that are run on a server near the market.
So if you are trading manually, you can scalp or swing trade intraday. It's not worth trying to manually scalp say .50 - .75 points since the commissions and price movements will kill.
In an example of a trade I did last night, I went for 1.5 points but was going to add to that trade if we went back down to the 1st support level with my stop being much lower. Price 1st went 1 point in my favor then it came back down to BE, then it went 1 point against me before going back up and hitting my target.
If you had a 1 point stop, you would have been stopped out on the trade. If you went for .75 you probably would have gotten it without heat but you are still paying commissions which means you would need close to a 90 % win rate to make up for that and you miss out on more profit.
So if you are trading manually, you can scalp or swing trade intraday. It's not worth trying to manually scalp say .50 - .75 points since the commissions and price movements will kill.
In an example of a trade I did last night, I went for 1.5 points but was going to add to that trade if we went back down to the 1st support level with my stop being much lower. Price 1st went 1 point in my favor then it came back down to BE, then it went 1 point against me before going back up and hitting my target.
If you had a 1 point stop, you would have been stopped out on the trade. If you went for .75 you probably would have gotten it without heat but you are still paying commissions which means you would need close to a 90 % win rate to make up for that and you miss out on more profit.
if you scalp at all you don't even think about commissions and risk is also something you don't think about because it is always fixed.
If you use a fixed stop then risk is fixed to that stop. However, you need to give trade room to breath. The best stop is where price proves that the trade is wrong usually somewhere under support.
We have to look at the difference between humans and machines. A machine can make money on 1 cent movements on a stock because their owners pay to have their servers co located and they can see order flow since they pay for it. So for example, they see vol rising on the buy side and can act in less than 1 sec. Since they do millions of transactions their commission cost is much lower than a normal human trader.
I checked my NT report and it says my average time for a trade to complete is around 14 min. However, I consider most of these trades scalps not swing trades. I would like to add some swing trades in the future since if you are right in direction, you can make more money so those trades while still intraday may take 1 hour or more to complete.
We have to look at the difference between humans and machines. A machine can make money on 1 cent movements on a stock because their owners pay to have their servers co located and they can see order flow since they pay for it. So for example, they see vol rising on the buy side and can act in less than 1 sec. Since they do millions of transactions their commission cost is much lower than a normal human trader.
I checked my NT report and it says my average time for a trade to complete is around 14 min. However, I consider most of these trades scalps not swing trades. I would like to add some swing trades in the future since if you are right in direction, you can make more money so those trades while still intraday may take 1 hour or more to complete.
What are their conditions for scalping? I hear so many brokers frown it the practice.
brokers should love it lots of trades and lots of commish
If you want to do less trades, you can increase your win percent by having negative risk vs reward. This is actually better for scalping trades. For example, I was very sure the ES future was going to trade down to my target in the trade I was in tonight.
Now my stop was much higher than my target. To make up for this I was going to add 1 contract if the price approached the much higher resistance level and then I could set target price to my original entry price.
So price did break above the lower resistance level and then came back under my entry giving possibly a false breakout to the upside signal. Did not need to take the signal since I was already in the trade and target was before the 1st support level. My 2nd entry was never filled.
So yes I took heat this trade, but did not make my mistake of reversing to a long which would have also been stopped out. Since price did not break major resistance level there was no reason to suddenly switch to bullish bias when we had so much technical damage done. Target was finally hit while I stopped watching price.
I did check back into the trade but mostly I did other things since watching the trade the whole time can cause psychological problems like fear. Many times traders will take less profit because they are afraid price is going to come back and turn the trade into a loss. Also, traders will take bigger losses because they are upset about a losing trade and move their stop hoping it will not be hit. However, for scalping we want to have reasonable stops and targets that are determined by previous supports and resistance levels. Obviously, if I did 2 contracts I could have let 1 contract run but since resistance level is so much higher, I don't want to take the heat of 2 contracts going against me and I don't know or right now care if the support will be broken. The overall trend of ES is still down and as far as I know no new reports came out to change this trend.
By trading less contracts you can also go for a wider stop, which is also good when price makes bigger moves due to higher volatility in the market. Also, before I took the trade tonight, I said to myself I am willing to accept the loss on both contracts if my stop is hit. You need to be willing to psychologically accept the trade you about to do could be a loss. Also, you may want to have an overall loss amount you are willing to take for the day.
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I think we will have have a down day Friday, but I think I am done trading till next week.