It is much better to be a trend follower than an intra-day tick scalper. but if you must scalp and you have ALL day to watch the market you should consider the E-mini NASDAQ 100 Futures Contract. You get the leverage, liquidity and quick execution with minimal daytrade margins and you can open an account with as little as $2,500 and trade 1 futures contract!!! Furthermore, there is no uptick rule and you can short just as easy as going long. www.cme.com Also, the probability of blowing yourself out in the long run is very high and I must say I don't know ANY successful LONG-TERM scalpers. But I do know plenty of VERY SUCCESSFUL Swing traders and trend traders.
TR: The very successful swing and trend traders you are referring to are specifically in the E-mini NASDAQ or other instruments?
Yes, that is correct!! I must say that the most successful traders that "I" know personally have traded exclusively in the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 Futures. However, I must be honest and say that the above people mentioned also traded Dow Jones Futures Options and S&P 500 Futures Options as well as the underlining futures contracts themselves. Keep in mind that these instruments were creative for that purpose.
Wow, amazing the BS you hear here. Lets see, the two guys sitting right next to me have both traded for 4-5 years. They both started about the same time, 4-5 years ago. One of them NEVER holds a position into swing, the other been messing round lately. The first makes 250,000 a year consistently, the other double that (although i do not know bout this year, he has been fucking round way too much). Another guy does a lot more swing trading but it starts off from a scalping position. It just depends whether he feels there are buyers/sellers. I personally do the same sometimes but the primary source of entry is scalping. You can easily do both scalping and week to week swing trading. Nothing wrong with a steady day to day cash income.
The first thing to do when scalping is pay next to nothing for the trades.I am able to make pennies with size and through next to nothing in fees and rebates I am able to take scalpes.I can do 300-400k shrs a day easy and actually make muney on the fees(with rebates).With the above you now have a chance to make money with 25-50-or 200k.
Its interesting to note the correlation between style effectiveness and the emergence of threads discussing such styles... the relative lack of momentum follow-through (on average) over the last couple of weeks has given the pure scalpers a decidely better near-term P&L than the pure longer-term daytraders... post-Labor day, when the volume (in all probability) starts to juice the market, the various discussions on scalping will probably die down and be replaced by the new "strategy du jour", namely holding on for the day, or even holding overnight ... market cycles tend to balance out the effectiveness of the various styles over the long-run... it is my strongly held contention that all that matters is to develop a fairly robust methodology (be it based on the scalping, daytrading or swingtrading timeframe) that is closely aligned with one's personality, and stick diligently to it... those who constantly switch strategies prior to obtaining any consistency will never succeed... in my view, discover yourself and then base your methodology on that discovery...
There is much that I agree with in this thread, but there is nothing I agree with more than this. BTW, there seems to be some confusion about scalping in this thread. Although scalping results are usually correlated to the size of the gain/loss and time of possesion, it is not it's definition, as some seem to imply in this thread. To answer the original question: $50K retail, $25K at a pro/prof firm. Total buying power should be about $200K intraday. nitro
THAT'S TOO BAD!!! Is that ALL he made!!!! As a Swing Trader in the E-mini S&P 500 or the BIG "SPOOS" you could of trippled that with a fraction of margin cost needed to scalp intra-day at most discount firms that trade stocks. THAT'S RIDICULOUS!!! Post your trades in realtime and we will see how "EASY" it is to trade multiple time frames "consistently" Let's see if you can post $250K in profit in 12 months? I think not!! The guy your referring to that makes $250k a year consistently has an account size of at least 2- 3x's that. The initial question is referring to how much captal is needed. The average trader has at least $25k in his or her account. That is the requirement in order to day trade at most discount firms. I mentioned Futures because the initial cash requirement is only a fraction of that need to daytrade stocks. Furthermore, it takes alot of experience and discipline to trade multiple timeframes. "Know thyself"........You are either a daytrader ("Scalper") or you trade short-term ("Swing Trader") or you trade Intermediate to Long term (Buy & Hold). Most traders are not equipped to handle more than that. There is nothing "Easy" about "Scalping"!!!! p.s. By the way I post my trades realtime before the market even opens. how about you? Your right there is alot of BS on these boards!