I'm not a scalper, but I agree when going for a small move and watching price action to determine an exit, 5 seconds is often the difference between a profitable trade and a break even trade.
That strategy will just add an element of confusion for me. My pea-sized brain could not switch from a $12 to a $62 scale in a blink of an eye. Many traders would laugh at how simple my screen looks. BTW, looking back over the past week, both of these are nice clean traders. Having few shorts participating may be alot of the reason. If they keep this up, I may have to re-think this
I think you'll find they will stay that way for a bit - for reference, try looking at Proshares' 2x funds for the first few months/quarters. I know they were hard to short in the beginning too. To make things shortable you really need people holding them longer term. Right now many traders/firms are scared to hold these overnight - unless the 3x'es are their overnight hedge. I'm not a scalper and I look for a little longer term trade but I do use the opposite pair to give me an indicator. That combined with the IIV value (FAS.IV & FAZ.IV) will give you a lot of clues when they are about to start a move. Have you tried calling IB and asking them if they can either a) be put on the short list or b) borrow them so you can short?
Sold all my FAZ today at $74.00 Aside from that when you see a gain like you have seen in SKF and FAZ its time to run far far away, I know for a fact even if SKF jumps to $250 and FAZ say $150 I know these ETFS will fall just as fast as they rose. I have traded them before and have seen my profits turn into losses Extremely fast holding these during these market conditions. I will get back into FAZ under $50 and SKF under $120 again sometime over the next 4-6 weeks, maybe even sooner.
I bought FAS at 7.78 8000 shares after its bounce from the low of the day today and took profit at 8, made money but left ALOT on the table...
15K was left and with the after hours trading assume premarket holds flat it is 20K lol I have kept from losing by not getting greedy though. There's no way I would have held until 2:15pm when this puppy took off though... edit--- I do not trade these often. They are too much for me to handle and my buddy trades this stuff at a firm in chicago that runs programs that scalps pennies on them. I don't think competing against those people is what I want to be doing. I wasn't going to touch this stock since it opened up 10%, but when it came back to level with yesterdays collapse it began looking tasty, it was also near the bottom of a band then it bounced 1% so I nabbed it.