Hello volpri, Yes, I get bored as well, that is why I come on here to hang with you folks. Trading gets very boring once you figured things out and know how to take money from the futures market.
For me you could be right. I want to respond to the issue of scalping and 1 tick instead of going into guessing why VST did what he did. Based on his posts and @volpri's posts, I understand the principles/rationales behind the approach. It has some statistical basis and could work in principle The devil is in the details and IMHO very difficult to implement consistently over time and over changing market conditions. I played with it for a couple of weeks including this morning and couldn't make it work. At best, I got some random small profits. At worse, I racked up a string of losses. I should stop fooling around and go back to what got me here.
That's an exaggerated example. If you're using a discount broker, on a one-tick target, you should net at least $7.50/contract. On 10 contracts, that's $75 (net) x 4 (trades per day) x 20 (days per month) x 12 (months) is $72,000 (year). So if you're buying your broker rib-eyes, you're buying yourself rib-eyes, as well. Just because someone might target only one tick on ES doesn't mean they have to make 100 trades per day. And they wouldn't have to trade using a tick chart, either. They could use a 15s, 30s, or even 1m chart. The biggest danger with 1-tick trading is... you better not lose!!
Here is how I scalp those so-called random moves and noise and make the cash register jingle. Price is in a developing range after ORBO and 2 legged MM up. It is morphing into a TR. Entry#1 on BO of previous two bars expecting at least a scalp up to near the top of the range. That failed to give me enough so I added. Entry#2 added long twice as many contracts as previous entry. So averaged down. Scaled in to sound nice! Entry#3 Now at the bottom of developing TR. Take a chance and bet we will go back up enough to make money on entry #2 and #3 and then leave entry#1 as a bit of a runner. Exits: Bar 10:50 I exit both entry#2 and #3 with profits. After 3rd attempt up i.e. a HH than the previous bar (higher high). Usually after 2 or 3 attempts at something then market will do something else. Plus it is getting close to the upper end of a developing TR. So, I just wanna grab that money! (Remember.. the concept of the market probing to find more transactions and traders) Look at any noise that pundits say not tradeable and you will see a lot of volume. Somebody is still trading or vol would be dry up. Guess who? Bar 10:55 I exit entry #1 grabbing more profit. I exit this because at the top 1/4 of an established range (21 bars sideways..count them). Odds favor a move back down now to the bottom of the range as 80% of BOs of a TR fail and price goes back into or towards the range within 5 bar. Got things to do so may not trade any more today. But this is how I look at markets for scalping, using averaging down and context. Of course, there are times I am wrong on my read but I have strategies to deal with that too.
And here is what happened after my trades. While I was annotating the chart. See that move back down. We are in a range. So called chop and noise. Untradeable. Me thinks not!