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1a2b3cppp
Trading for 4 points with 10 point stop is not scalping. It may be considered scalping during a flash crash type of event, where price jumps 10 points within seconds. But in regular, everyday trading, 4 points is what I would call trading intraday swings.
Bone explained the origins of scalping, what it was in the old pit world. With screen trading this changed. You did not have anymore the advantage the pit traders had before.
But trading on the computer offered other, new possibilities. A new way of scalping. Basically it is pretty simple: you do very short term trades under the assumption that the short term volatility is stronger than the (intraday) long term volatility. Clever guys like Paul Rotter (the Flipper) discovered ways to increase short term volatility in their favour, to make their scalping game even more profitable or work at all.
In today's markets, scalping is probably not as easy as it used to be. But since these electronic markets of today are all I know, I grew up with them and had to play and learn with what is there in front of me. Even though there are many here who say scalping is dead, it is exactly what I do (almost) every day. It is not easy, but there is also no rocket science involved. Dont overcomplicate stuff, dont try do solve this in an analytical way. To me, scalping in the markets is all about experience, about being engaged actively in the market hour after hour, day after day for many years. With no indicators, no charts, no funny tool at all. Just a DOM to follow the pure market action and get a feel for it.
You can scalp almost every liquid market that is out there these days, but to me it is so much more easy and fun (and fun is very important to stick to something for a long time) to scalp fast, volatile markets like the FDAX, CL, NQ or ES. There are also people who prefer ZN, FGBM or FESX. Those can be fine too, you can play these markets with serious size, but you wont get that many opportunities per day and thats what makes it kind of boring to me.
Scalping to me is going for 1 tick or 2, in very fast markets like the FDAX, NQ or CL you sometimes get lucky and the market snaps back in your favour and you get instant 10 ticks or something like that as bonus. But the bread and butter is 1-3 ticks, even in these markets.
To trade these small moves and be net profitable at the end of the day, you need a good cost structure. With RT fees of 4 EUR/ USD you can forget about it. You have to trade some volume, so you can negotiate low commissions with your broker. And/ or you can get an exchange membership, which is pretty cheap to lease on CME. On Eurex, you can even get exchange fee rebates for free ! No matter how you do it, to really scalp without too much worries from the cost/ fee side, your total cost per ROUNDTURN should be around 2 USD for CME products, and 1 EUR for Eurex products.
Greetings,
CALLumbus