Scalping

What it is

Capturing small price moves on the 1-5 minute timeframe.

Scalping exists because order books are noisy. Market makers quote a bid and an ask, and between those two prices there is a constant tug-of-war as large orders get worked into the book. A scalper is not predicting where an asset will be next month — they are trying to be on the right side of the next few hundred ticks and get out before the noise reverses. That makes execution quality, not analysis, the main variable: a 2-tick worse fill on a 10-tick target destroys a third of the trade's expected value.

Market conditions that matter

Scalping works best when the spread is one tick wide and volume is heavy — US equity index products in the first hour, BTC and ETH during US/Europe overlap, EUR/USD around the London open. It fails in thin overnight sessions, in low-volume altcoins where the spread can be 0.3% (three times a typical target), and around scheduled events such as CPI or FOMC where the book empties out seconds before the print.

Best suited to

Traders with fast execution, low latency and tight spreads. Liquid markets like SPY, BTC, ES futures.

Badly suited to

Beginners, anyone on slow internet, or anyone trading wide-spread alts.

The steps

• Pick one liquid instrument and trade only that for 30 days.
• Use 1-min + 5-min charts; ignore higher timeframes for entries.
• Risk ≤0.25% of equity per trade — you'll take 10-30 trades a day.
• Hard stop after 3 consecutive losses; revenge trading is the #1 killer.
• Review every trade nightly — most edge comes from cutting bad setups, not adding new ones.

Worked example

Long BTC at $95,120 with stop $95,080, target $95,210 — risking $40 to make $90.

The numbers behind it

With a 57% win rate and a 1:1.5 reward-to-risk ratio, expectancy per trade is (0.57 x 1.5) - (0.43 x 1) = +0.42R. On a $100,000 practice account risking 0.25% ($250) per trade, that is roughly $105 of expected value per trade before costs — and costs are the point: 20 trades a day at $3 round-turn is $60, so more than half the theoretical edge goes to friction. Test that friction in the simulator before assuming it away.

How it fails

• Trading a wide-spread instrument. If the spread is 0.2% and your target is 0.15%, the position is negative-expectancy before you click.
• Increasing size after a losing streak to 'get it back'. Scalping produces long strings of small losses by design; size changes turn a normal drawdown into a blow-up.
• Holding a scalp that goes against you and calling it a swing trade. That is a different plan with a different stop, and switching mid-trade means you have no plan at all.

Practising it safely

Run this method for at least thirty simulated trades with fixed sizing before judging it, and record every trade in the journal. A handful of winners proves nothing. Educational simulation only — not financial advice.