When I first scalping, was not electronic and I was retail, use to call down to the floor, tick size in S&P was a nickel and $25, all I had then was charts and I was going for 5 ticks, had to use stops as it might be 10 seconds before they answer phone on floor, then came out trading stocks for much cheaper fees so I went to just daytrading IBM till they switched from 16ths to pennies, never was able to get filled completely at my price so went to currency futures, but always using charts, eventually went electronic doing ES and the Dome. I always got headaches watching the Dome, since everything eventually gets automated now, I use charts manually, but I do have a couple systems programmed that watches nothing but the Dome, I can spot couple patterns using Dome and can tell when to stay in for couple extra ticks, but almost always take the 3 ticks, for me being using charts for 40 years, just 2nd nature for me to read. I think scalping IS the toughest part of trading and why newest of traders attempt is foolish. You have to breath your well back tested/forward tested method months. Scalping for most part is trading during controlled noise and you trying to coat tail much larger traders and firms, volume drives the markets, always has, so no sense of trying to re-invent the wheel. Just makes more sense to me to day trade for new traders, buying near support and risk little to make 3 times risk. It is said everything is 50/50, where you change this is risk management, first by looking to the left to see if you should even take a position, then being knowledgeable to read charts when in the trade to tighten stops sooner or take profit sooner as you might be expecting reverse, studying what happens tops/bottoms. I think the term "professional" is a joke, we all trying to steal people's money, so whether you use the Dome or charts, don't matter, what matters is what it takes for you to make money. Good luck.
I find that as I get closer to pulling the trigger, my eyes tend to gravitate towards leve2. It's like dropping to the lowest timeframe possible. I remember what the chart looks like and what the candle will look like once certain levels are cleared. I'm neither professional nor single tick scalper though.
I don't think there's a definitive answer to be had here. If you're doing any trading style by hand it comes down to where your skills are, your capitalization, fee structure etc. It also doesn't have to be column A or column B, there's plenty of traders out there that hold a core position for a 'swing' timeframe but scalp around it to help cushion the pullbacks. I also think it's product dependent for scalping; unless you have an advantageous fee structure you want to find products that have a sweet spot of big tick size relative to your costs, but not overly competitive for queue position. I'd be looking at the Ultra Bond and Silver personally. That being said I think that you're destined to have a brutal drawdown at some point if you don't have some kind of hard stop or ability to hedge/leg into a spread instantly in place. Markets can reprice much much faster than a manual trader can react to. And with a scalping style where your winners are much more likely to be proportional to your losers a big hit can be demoralizing and hard to come back from. Even if you're ruthless and hit the flatten button immediately you will likely get slipped big time.
I can’t really comment on what the guy in the video was doing in that the clip failed to pique my curiosity or hold my interest. But I was looking for a thread that dealt with stock losses and this seems to be the best choice among those available. It took me much longer than I was anticipating, approximately three years, to optimize a successful Forex trading strategy I came up with in November of 2015, but everything I look into now simply reinforces what I already have. So being as satisfied as I imagine I will ever be with the system’s ability to forecast price direction, I am now turning my attention to the best approach to setting my stop losses. With a daily success rate that is usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% to 100%, the main thing preventing me from maximizing my profits at this point is that half the time my average loss trade outstrips my average profit trade. If I make it so that this stops happening altogether, I trust that my profit factor will improve dramatically, thus here I am. My plan is to use one of the two simple moving average envelopes plotted on the above chart as my standard stop loss setting. I intend to try the gray envelope first and will probably only test the second if I'm not happy with the subsequent results.
In this video Andrew Lockwood describes his five-minute high probability scalping strategy. Andrew describes a scalper is a trader who looks to scalp out small profits multiple times a day. He conceptualizes a scalper as someone seeking to reap approximately ten, fifteen, or twenty pips profit per trade throughout the trading day, with tight take-profit and stop loss targets. Given that my impression is that this guy is not full of a bunch of baloney (unlike the impression I have of folks like Jason Bond and Kyle Dennis) I was interested in comparing my own strategy, Numerical Price Prediction or NPP, with the information he presents in the video. The strategy he describes in the clip is a trend following strategy. Whether or not Numerical Price Prediction (NPP) is such might be arguable, depending on how you define trend, which from my perspective, is a relative concept in that it changes depending on what time frame one is considering. Andrew’s strategy looks for higher timeframe confirmation, but with NPP this is not necessary because higher timeframe variables are represented even on lower time frame charts. Nonetheless, sometimes it is worthwhile to consult the higher timeframes just to get a clearer picture of what is going on. For example, in viewing the horizon from the surface of the Earth, it’s understandable that an individual might believe the horizon to be straight. However, with the help of a little distance (as one gains from viewing the earth from space) it becomes clear that the Earth’s outline is not straight at all. The same can be said of lower time frame charts. However, it is also arguable, I believe, that should this be the case with respect to a given measurement, it is highly likely that the measure reflects an aspect of market conditions that has little or no bearing on what the market does in the short run. Andrew calls a higher timeframe confirmation chart an “anchor chart,” so in attempting to draw analogies between what Andrew describes in the video and my own system, I will substitute this expression with the term: “anchor moving average.” Lockwood’s system uses an hourly chart for confirmations, and trades off a five-minute chart. The 60-minute chart setup includes an 8- and 21-period exponential moving average. The five-minute chart setup includes an 8-, 13-, and 21-period exponential moving average. What he does is look for the moving averages to fan out in a particular way, very similar to an approach described by Nick McDonald of Trade with Precision. Something I find interesting about Lockwood’s method however is that he does not stick to the standard, most commonly used, moving average settings (as does McDonald, and as many trading experts and instructors insist retail traders ought to do). Like Andrew, I am also looking for specific moving averages to align in a particular arrangement, but their settings in no way reflect the settings used by Andrew and Nick. Lockwood’s strategy looks for pullbacks into the 8-period exponential moving average, whereas with NPP, the location of the pullback is not as important as is how it is defined by a designated moving average (i.e., short-term trend line). Andrew defines a given candlestick as a “trigger bar” based on its position whereas NPP defines a given candlestick as a “trigger bar” based on its interplay with (crossovers of) a designated moving average. Andrew sets take-profit targets and entry levels based on the lowest or highest point of the previous five candlesticks. However, my initial plan is to use a particular deviation level (band) of an associated moving average envelope based on the likelihood of price reaching that level as suggested by a statistical analysis of historical data. Lockwood sets stops three pips above or below the trigger bar, but again, I will be using a particular deviation level (band) of an associated moving average envelope which I will initially choose based on a statistical analysis of historical data, but anticipate possibly modifying in the light of real-life performance. Andy’s first take-profit target is one × risk. His second is two × risk. An alternative exit strategy he likes to use is to replace the second take-profit target with a trailing stop set at the lowest low or highest high of the previous three candlesticks depending on whether the trader is in a long or short position. With regard to NPP however, a trader can let his or her profits run, achieving an effect tantamount to Andrew’s trailing stop, by remaining in trades as long as candlesticks continue to form on the “right side” of the designated short-term moving average.
Hey that's 99% how I trade Throw in a BB same Sma setting, find a suitable size, then it's join the direction of your Envelopes near the low of a tight BB range, SL out to envelope and print your own money!!
Yes on the 80%+ but I let losers run against me too much like you, well was, think I've got that solved but lack of time to trade for ages