I have been monitoring this site for a few months now, just reading the board here and there. I have yet to come across any SCALPERS like myself. I was just curious if anyone out there has ever thought about playing the momentum game. I am a proprietary trader here in NYC and work with many successful SCALPERS (relative to these troubled times). I understand that SCALPING requires the bare minimum on the commission side, which I am fortunate to have. I am curious what the word is out there in the community about this trading strategy.
If possible I like to play longer term and build a big position throughout a set time period. But if the market is just messing around and not going anywhere, like today, I'll flip 2000-2500sh lots of CPN and MIR around for .10-.15 a pop. Some days are good for position trading and others are good for scalping. I think it is good to know both strategies so that a trader can take advantage of slow days, volatile days and strong trending days.
Describe what type of scalper you are. And what PARTICULAR trading strategy do you use for scalping? Hopefully, out of the scalpers here...there may be one or two that has the same commonality in strategies as you do Nihaba Ashi
I scalp, in that I often make trades for small gains of under .5 or so goal. It really depends on the stock. The more liquid you can be. I've had decent results this year and my trading account is up over 150% so far this year. Those dimes and quarters really add up I guess. It's definately possible, but I honestly am slowly retiring my scalping operations. I think that the liquidity that futures allow makes it a much better option. It's much easier to move 20 e-mini contracts in a pinch, than 25k of some stock. The slippage is 1/4 and occasionally 1/2 pts as opposed to as much at 50c on a stock if you're moving size. There's no comparison.
I think I fall in this category. I trade the highly liquid nasdaq stocks, 1000 times a day or so. It seems to me there are coming more and more prop traders to the game, look at SUNW, if you hit the soes key, you'll be lucky to get any shares as there are at least 100 traders before you trying to get shares. In our firm on an average day I think there are 50 traders scalping SUNW. I'd like to share experiences about scalping in a prop firm's environment. Bachelier
My personal scalping experience is in very illiquid to semi-illiquid names. I won't touch anything that trades over a mil shares on avg. Usually I'm in names where the volume is under 200k.