Don Miller's 2008 performance can serve as a benchmark, just shy of 0.5 ES tic net profit per roundtrip contract traded ($1.6M on 293k RTs), unless you want to compete with AMT
I might be stating the obvious at this point after everything you've demonstrated, but FWIW, after much experimentation, now it's clear to me why scalping doesn't measure up to position trading. It boils down to money management - scalping limits the ability to build position sizes for stretched target scaleouts the way position trading allows you to do. Or, put another way, scalping setups don't seem to carry enough information for adjusting position sizes for optimal risk/reward. That information lies in bigger picture order flow analysis, not temporal divergences. The ability to BOTH build-up size on the right entries WHILE limiting exposure (size as well as stops) on entries that end up being recycled is the biggest ingredient contributing to the bottom line from what I can see. I'm guessing you've seen this a while back and decided to dump the peanuts and move to the cockpit...
To Manlycure: JL: "...the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements- that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend."
regardless of how you do it individually................the TREND is where the money is. Scalping etc is just playing with your dummy.
It's been an expensive lesson but I have come to that conclusion as well. The ego thrives on lifting itself above others or pushing others down and scalping is immediate gratification for the ego. So trading futures in a position mode is going beyond where few traders have gone before.
Scalping lends itself to automation since the information content is straightforward to program into an algorithm. How many Gary Kasparov's are left to out trade a machine? A trader not going beyond the algorithmically-arbitraged-away information is pretty much guaranteed to be "gone". Ego is of no use for the purpose of winning, unless it's backed by a true ability to out program the quants (and take money from traders who believe they can beat a machine).