I'm sure there are plenty of people still making a living at it, but scalping stocks was much easier in my opinion before August 2003 because intraday volatility was much higher (mind you, it's been over a year now since I've scalped equities on a regular basis). I guess it depends on your style though, I like trends and volatility.
On Nasdaq another thing that made life a lot easier was that market makers would generally use their own ID to execute through soes so it was pretty easy to front run them with an island bid/offer (getting filled was a lot easier too) and you'd have a nice big safety net to get out with if you were wrong. I never traded when fractions were around (unfortunately) but everyone I've talked to who did said it was extremely easy back then. Too bad conditions like that will likely never exist again. But now everything's very anonymous and computerized and reading a Level 2 screen is next to useless. Can't say I'm a big fan of rebates either. However, if volatility picked up I don't see why scalping stocks wouldn't become a more profitable profession than it currently is.
