With my financial goals, capital, and time horizon, scalping makes the most sense for me. I like to take advantage of futures leverage, and I don't like holding overnight (especially these days) so I don't want the kinda large stop one needs to catch all day or longer term moves. But thanks anyway for the advice.
Since you asked the question, I would like to answer. When you take a trade, you are taking a risk anyways. Why not maximise the move in the direction of the trend? Why scalp? I dont know about your transaction charges. I trade stock futures and the transaction charges are significant in my country. So I try not to scalp. I take a trade in the direction of the trend. If it goes past my stop loss, I reverse my position. It can reverse again and whipsaw. Yourself as my counter-trader would make profit in this scenario. I consider these whipsaws as my cost of trading. I am waiting for the big trend move. So if you are my counter-trader, my losses (costs) are your profits. But in your case you need to have clear defined stop losses. You cannot let the trend go against you for long. That is where my profit comes from. I will share one hypothetical example. Generally trends have legs. The first leg could be a big spike. Then it may pullback in sideways consolidation or even a small reversal. I would have likely entered in the first leg itself. I might get caught in the pullback whipsaws. I lose money here. It is like air turbulence after take off. I take the opposite trade too. That is because I SAR. I am waiting for the second big leg now. That is where I profit. Now this is a trade off. My trend capture should be bigger than my whipsaw losses and transaction charges. This is my real challenge.
It's all about Mean / Variance. High Mean / High Variance -> inefficient trend High Mean / Low Variance -> efficient trend Low Mean / High Variance -> inefficient range Low Mean / Low Variance -> efficient range Scalpers don't want trends. They want Variance. Trends (if any) only give a bias. I like VWAP or anchor an AVG through the session. Then plot the 1, 2 or 3 standard deviations around the mean. Kind of a developing bollinger bands. Especially 1min, 20min scalps. You won't profit much from trends. Trends trade need time to work out. Asymmetric returns happen towards infinity. Sometimes it takes 390min (RTH) for price to go from A to B. Sometimes it takes multiples days, weeks, months, years.
Interesting. So you don't think a scalper can/should identify the trend first? I've been doing that and then looking either for a fade or continuation entry. Tricky part is when you have rival interpretations where you have to decide if a medium sized move is a new trend or just a deeper pullback. That seems to be where I confuse myself the most often. Anyway maybe I'm misrepresenting what I do by calling it scalping? My style at the moment is small but not tiny targets (25 ticks on /CL for example). And I'm looking for signs of (1) trend exhaustion (i.e. double tops) to fade. Even if that point is not a full reversal, the pullback is usually enough to hit my target, or (2) trend continuation where I can catch the next leg of an already ongoing trend that doesn't look exhausted. Forgive me if I'm using terminology differently or wrong. Again, I'm still a relative newbie who's never had an opportunity to actually collaborate with other traders in person so the way I use lingo may sometimes be a little off.
I gave up on trying to catch all day trends a long time ago. It just didn't suit my personality. I hate nothing more than being up a good number and having it come back to breakeven. I realize others are different, but I find it very demoralizing to have invested a few hours in a trade, and have it reverse and you end up getting little to nothing.
This is why you should have predefined profit and loss levels. Sometimes a trend will hit your profit target, and then the trend will go on without you. A way to deal with this is to exit half your position at a predetermined price, and let the rest of your position ride, hoping to capture a big move.
Any time spent day trading is time wasted. Might as well get a 9-5 job and ask if you can work for minimum wage.