Scalping Index futures

[polpolik]

It's easier to scalp when the market is very direction and volatile. Wait til it slows down again and volatility goes down. If you continue to make 2 trades a minute, you'll have a harder time making money.

 

[eusdaiki]

Sure I can make more money scalping volatile markets. No doubt about that, but I can still get a profit by scalping 1 or even 2 ticks if the market isn´t moving.

 

[brownsfan019]

Quote from eusdaiki:

well yeah, and Im trying to increase that number to at least 2 trades per minute. Is gonna take me sometime but that´s my goal.

2 trades per minute? WOW. I wish you the best with that. Too much activity for me!

 

[joeyata1]

i challange anyone who's averaged 1 k contracts a day to show me there p@l's over the last 3 years. who's pennies a trade r/t? the cheapest rates i've ever ehard of even for a member is 30-40 cents r/t. if you trade prop you trade that members account. if this info is wrong please tell me

 

[polpolik]

Quote from eusdaiki:

Sure I can make more money scalping volatile markets. No doubt about that, but I can still get a profit by scalping 1 or even 2 ticks if the market isn´t moving.

It's easier said than done. Even in slow markets, it's not always predictable when it will stay nice and keep in the range of 1 to 2 ticks. Plus, if you seriously trade 1 to 2 ticks, your probability of wins will be high but your losses will be much higher.

If you keep your stop loss to 1 to 2 ticks, then you'll get stopped out almost every time.

You'll find out soon enough. I'm not saying it can't be done but it's not as easy as you're making it out to be.

 

[BCE]

Quote from eusdaiki:

I got to +$100 today for the first time.
Im doing around about 50 trades per hour

Gee, that's a lot of work for +$100 How many trades did it take you to make that much? There are a lot of much easier ways to make $100.

 

[joeyata1]

in every industry there's a very very few people that master a way such as scalping to make big money. but the almost 99.9% of the people can't. it's sjtu the way the game works. thats why position trading gives one a far greater chance to win consistentlly as you take the jiggles out of the game.

 

[smilingsynic]

Quote from eusdaiki:

I pay much less than $2 per trade... adding all commisions it doesnt even add to $1.

But what about slippage? The NQ has a spread of between $5-10 (1/4 to 1/2 a point) a contract, usually.

 

[NCYankee]

I'll repost this from the other thread on the NQ - you didn't mention in this thread that your trading was on a simulator, and I think the question is of interest in this thread:
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One question for you - how does your simulator come up with the fill prices? Last tick, bid/ask or how?

I ask because it sounds like your style is to jump on momentum thrusts - and this can produce slippage. If you are doing 200 trades (as you stated in the other thread) - and let's assume you would only get slippage on entry since you would be bailing out when the momentum dries up - 1 tick slippage per trade would amount to a difference of $1000/day. Even if you only had slippage on 10-20% of your entries (which IMO would be optimistic), that would still be $100-200 a day.

As someone I know from another board like to say - you have to pay the vig.

 

[eusdaiki]

I sell at the bid, buy at the offer. Always take away liquidity.

Yes my trading for the last two weeks has been on simulation. But I always do a process of simulation before testing a new strategy.