Scalper 250 to 500 trades per day

I agree.. Great thread. This thread started out with broken english, and has since been a great example of a constructive contirbution and positive ET discussion.

As for the scalper I mentioned earlier. Some points I remember is he would trade the majority in the morning, and only trade the afternoon if he happend to be down from the morning, which was a rare occurence. I also recall in our talks him hinting about how after a large move in any direction he would watch for volume to start printing, then wait for the spreads to retighten. Then his entry would be majority based on the direction of the spread retightening and his intuition on if to even pull the trigger. I find a lot of traders don't take into count the information of level 1. Level2 is a smoke and mirror mess, but the level 1 spread can tell quite a story about imediate buyer seller sentiment in large moves.

Quote from Osiris:

Great thread guys...I have always wanted to develop some form of intra-day strategy....scalping would be interesting as well. I am a position trader now...and frankly the daily volatility is a tad rough at times :eek:

A question for those who scalp, could you explain a bit what sort of entries you guys are using. Does not have to be too specific if you likely don't want to advertise how you trade, but just from a conceptual point of view. I have wondered if it is a sort of breakout strategy on a very short term indication, or instead if it is more of a range or chop strategy with more of a fading type of entry?

Other than that do you guys use similar TA to swing/position traders, or is it mostly just reading the tape and the depth?

Then again, if I am completely of base, heh, it would be great to hear what you guys actually do :D

Chaos, that is what I admire about the short term traders....when they are good...their equity curves are just awesome! Do you have an idea of what sort of entries that scalper that you knew used?
More...
 
i would just like to throw my 2 cents in about the whole idea some people have that scalping is an inferior way to trade. there are whole firms that employ only scalp traders so the idiotic statement that "only 1% of scalpers are profitable" is just that...idiotic! The joy about being a scalper....of which i am.....is that not only can i make money buying and selling the same price of a stock but i can also join any breakout run that a stock has. I can make money taking 0 ticks and i can make money taking 5 tick or 20 tick winners....all of which i have done. So before anyone else trys to trash scalpers (aka prop traders)....try and do some homework so you have an idea of what your talkin about. I average about 1000 bucks a day and there are guys at my firm that average 3-5k a day.......so if that is not profitable to anyone outthere then i am envious of your financial position. Please think before you post a reply....if you want to say stupid things just to hear yourself type...join a chat room.....and here is a pic of one of my pnl's where i scalped 1444 out of the market....if its a bad pic the real on is on page 51 of the pnl thread.
 

Attachments

yes rebate trading isnt scalping.....but is scalping not just trying to take 1 tick winners over and over (i could be wrong with this).....which is what rebate traders actually try to do bu in the event that they arent going to get their tick they just scratch at the same level for profit........if im way off i will just shut up
 
rebate trading is where you get paid to post bids and offers on an ecn.......so i place a bid for 1000 shares on thr brut ecn and if i get hit they pay me $0.002 per share.....i can then offer those shares out at the same price on Brut and get another $0.002 per share so i make $4 minus sec fees buying and selling at the same price
 
I think joeyata hit the nail on the head with the auto execute look at the guys who are making 600-1000 trades per day and youll find alot of them are taking advantage of the auto-ex so you sit there and when you want 20000 shares of a stock that could be 20 trades in 20 out or even more, that way the
specialist cant screw you around hold your orders and pull, plus if you are trading new york and you send large orders out the specialist/marketmaker will test you to find if you are for real
I scalp Ford mostly and I usually do 20000 shares a pop ive thought about taking advantage of auto execute because that guy is the biggest thief out there and alot of the time if you send large orders his way and you are on the same side as him you never get a fill, care to comment on the auto execute szeven? god forbid if you are on thew wrong side of that guy he will try to ram them so far up your ass youll be walking bow legged for a week, prime example the other day i got filled on 50k shares trying to prop a level, and i panicked at first everything behind me for 5 cents was gone, were talking about 500000 shares being pulled here, I think with auto ex they never really get the chance to see exactly what your hand is if your going 1000, 1000, 1000, 1000, 1000 there is no way anyone can possibly pay attention to you on the high volume stocks, thus instant execution and your coming in under the radar screens.

oh yeah, and whats up Ben its Dan

Quote from joeyata1:



to put wether a scalper can make money i'll tell you little story. in 2000 a little company called freetrade came on the scene owned by amtd. i found it in june 2000 1 month after it opened. THEY CHARGED NO COMMISSIONS AND GOT PAID WITH ORDER FLOW. the fills were amazing as they had an autoexecution fill so it was instant wether the shares were there are not. so i started off doing 100 trades a day then 200,300,500,1000 trades a day. the idea was to keep the orders under 300 shares so they'd be filled autoexec(anything more was held by the mm and i got screwed) so i did some thinking. wha if i had 5 monitors and had 30 order tickets open ? so i did that and filled out 5 stocks every morning on those 30 tickets. what made this possible was the order stayed there after i clicked the go button so i could hit the backspace button and jsut change it to sell. so eery time the futures ran off a ottom i popped out 30 orders in 10 seconds. once i hit all 30 orders i hit the backspace button on all 30 windows and checked sell instead of buy. i only traded fat nyse stocks that lagged the futures so when the futures tunred up i had 30 seconds to get in before they moved. it wa slike shoioting ducks as ge,aol,mmm etc all lagged the futures so i could get 9k shares fast. what made this possible was the market was very volatile those years. anyway in mid 2001 freetrade changed to $1 a trade and tightened up the autoexec to only 100 shares. so i was ery depressed thinking game over thats 1 cent a share. WRONG in 2002 i had several 300k months after commissions. my commissions in 2002 WERE 300K. so the moral of the story is if the volatilty is there one can scalp huge and make big money. the trick is knowing when to not trade
More...
 
lol...like i didnt know who it was with all the ford talk Dan.....but not quite following what your saying......do you think its better to trade 1000 sahres at a time instead of 20,000 so that the specialist or anybody else doesnt try to screw u just out of spite?
 
Hey madmunny
I saw your p/l
$301 for sec fees
man you must be some super scalper i guess
well it is not bad if you are making money but i don't think its for every one
IT has to be in you to scan a couple of stock and scalp them
I sometime catch a stock and as soon as i go to get it it slip
so i guess a scalper has to be superb fast and must pay attention to which stock he can make a quick buck $$$$
 
just make sure your on the same side as the specialist and its never a problem,:D I dont like the auto execute cause then you have to keep going 1000, 1000, 1000 and you have to keep stroking them up a cent you got to have some serious reaction skills to try to get filled at a decent price on 20,000 shares if you want to ride the stocks momentum, I tried sending out market orders 1000 1000 1000 but those ass holes at merill will hold and fill you on the next level, I know that the ISI orders go through merill, where as brut passthrough is straight to the specialist for us so maybe a brut pass through market order would work, but I dont know where the brut pass through market is gonna fill you if brut is gone.
the auto execute only works if your retailing in too, i.e. buying the offer or selling the bid

auto execute works great for me on other stocks where im only taking on 1000-5000 share positions

oh yeah and nice day today szeven
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top