Hard stop means I set the SL for everyone to see when I placed my order. I found out the hard way there are a lot of SL hunters hunting for them and like to take them out. They don't see my mental stop.
Short answer is yes. Fortunately, for scalping, if my profit target is modest, there are always upswings I could take advantage of and book some small profits. The key is like @volpri said, we get in and out quickly for what the market is willing to give.
Guarantee your stop would be "seen", and taken out if you where in sim mode too. They aren't out to get you Do you journal your trades, and what types of things do you write down for the trades you wish you handled differently? Not tryin to hate, just to dig out the underlying answer with you. If there's a major market crash, power infrastructure outage, computer failure or whatever, dat'll have you wishing you made the rule earlier.
SLs are to protect you from adverse market moves against one's position. AND to protect yourself from yourself. 99.999% in the heat of the battle (so to speak) one's mind can be quite deceptive. While our mind is our greatest asset in trading it also can become, and very very quickly, our greatest enemy. It generally does what it wishes as it is tied to our brain. Our brain uses 20% or so of our energy so it a powerhouse that takes on a life of its own. . It's job is to generate thoughts (whether true or not) and THAT it will do and we cannot stop it from doing that. You simply cannot stop your mind or brain from generating thoughts by telling it to STOP. It will totally ignore you. What we have to learn to do as humans and in particular as traders is to discern if the thoughts it generates are true or false and "how" and then decide how we will to respond to those thoughts. That is, will we accept and act upon them or ignore them. Then we have to deal with our emotions which are also tied to our brain and mind. Emotions alone will provoke our brain to generating myriads of thoughts (true or not) and our mind becomes forced to make a decision through our will as to what to do with the thoughts our brain generates. Just observe the recent debacle in the oval office and you can see all three in open display. That sort of thing happens in trading too! To protect me I AM GOING to have a hard stop loss in place. However I use a dynamic hard SL. A hard PA SL. Its size varies because it is based on recent PA and PA itself varies in terms of momentum and size of movements over time. And whether I move that SL or not depends on what the market does and how it does it over time. That is one reason I use time based charts. By dynamic I mean that after I take on a position and have a SL in place I will move it depending on "how" PA does "whatever" it does. I may tighten it or I may widen it.
Don't worry about offending me, you are a good guy and I have thick skins. Yes, I do keep statistics, consist of: entry, # of trades, win rate, profit rate, etc. I have different SL/PT criteria and I do keep track of each. TOS kept a record of the trades in the chart, statistics and at the end of each day, I reviewed the trades to see if I should make adjustment the next day. I also tip-toed back into averaging down again. For the right TR, it could do wonders and it is hard to resist. Instead of avoiding it, I should follow @volpri and learn to make it works for me. Take care
I basically do I just trail the SL manually. In an uptrend manually move it up if momentum is good. If slow I just grab what it gives me.