They are trading noise, but, if they are to be believed, they have a method of extracting profits from the randomness by tight money management and intuitive chart reading. In 20 years of being involved in the markets, I have never seen real evidence of the success of this type of trading, all these folks seem to hang around message boards trying to help others for some reason--- but that doesn't mean its impossible. its not really scalping-- I would like to believe it. surf
There is a difference between working hard- what you do-and working smart. For every NoDoji who makes money the hardest way they know, there are 100 losers who wish they could work as hard as you. A loser is not somebody who loses money in the market.A loser is somebody who prefers somebody else to do their thinking for them,either by writing a book or by posting their golden nuggetts of wisdom here. Nodoji says she does it to help others.but any sane person knows that nobody does something for someone else unless there is something in it for themself.In this case it is "look how good i am at trading the hardest trading style there is" When a person says "i genuinely want to help others" what they mean is "i want to feel good about myself by helping others" Well that's fine...hardly worthy of hero worship though is it?
Yeah, I have seen a lot of scalpers posting online about how they trade lots of 10 ES for a few ticks or whatever. I've never seen any proof, though.
Dow currently 13873. One of the problems about not believing in the concept of a TREND (yup spanish believes there is no such thing as a trend) is you don't know when you're fighting it. This is nothing to do with the market - it's ego. Spanish hasn't learned how to read a market because his ego is so big it obscures the chart. That would be ok because we all have to learn.Immature kids like spanish will take longer to learn-if he ever does-because he also has some other rather unpleasant personality issues. For those that dont know,some time ago spanish was living (probably illegally in the Uk) in a flat that had a fault with the electricity supply/meter. He found out that his electricity consumption was registering not on his meter but on the meter of the flat below him.That meter belonged to " a stupid old pensioner" (probably a guy who fought the Nazis in WW2 in order to provide the quality of life in the UK that Spanish abuses.) What did spanish do when he found out this guy was unknowingly paying spanishs' bill for him?.....he ran up the bill as high as he could,leaving the heating on 24hrs etc.....nice huh? don't you just wish you had this loser living near you? And how do we know all this? because potty mouth lil loser came here and told us. It's almost as if he invented stupidity as a concept himself. APOLOGIES AT THIS POINT- i understand some of you have difficulty in reading posts that are more than a few sentences..just go back to your simulator or game site or whatever it is you do inbetween fighting the market. Back to the plot.Spanish also told us how he'd run up debts from bank loans which he had no intention of paying.And since he doesn't officially exist here (so he thinks) there is no point in paying tax.Neither was there any point going to college once the UK gov had given him a grant (my money and yours) to study here. With this background,for those of you who bothered to answer his question in an adult,intellectual way...now perhaps you have a better understanding of what kind of loser you're engaging with....yeah..better things to do with your time. NOTE: no traders' accounts were damaged or harmed by spanish in the making of this post. Press 1 if you just feel like hanging spanish Press 2 if you resent ever wasting precious seconds of your life replying to the loser Press 3 if you would like to see the loser forcibly removed from the country. Press 4 if you would like to hear these options again
When I started trading in the early 90's it was in the Treasury Bond Pit evening session as a scalper. I really never started to be able to build capital until I began to spread trade the treasuries. When Project A came along and the new age of electronic markets emerged - then it became possible for me to make a real "go" at it. I still had to stare at the futures screen and the cash market screens and I had to anticipate scenarios and work bids and offers because back in those days I had no choice but to leg spread legs manually - so in that sense the fact that I started out scalping in my career really helped my spread trade execution. My guess is that these days a competent point-and-click manual scalper would have to have excellent anticipation skills and will have built multiple scenarios in their mind before their trade entry because of the speed and turbulence in today's highly automated flat price markets. That's my guess. I don't think that "scalpers" these days are by practice the same that the term originally meant 15 years ago - when a "scalper" was literally an independent trader who participated in the marketplace to buy bids, sell offers, and quote to the brokers. Nope, these days scalpers would be more accurately categorized as "hit and run opportunists". That's my personal feeling about it at least.
Trends are great after the fact. The first problem is defining a trend. Is it a series of HHs and HLs? Is it based on the slope of a MA? Is it based on time? The second problem is that just because a trend exists based on whatever definition you are using does not mean it is any more likely to continue in that direction than it is to reverse at any given point. The concept of a "trend" basically says "because price is higher than it was previously, it is more likely to continue to go up." I have tested some super profitable systems that were "trend following". The problem is that when they weren't making huge profits they were getting chopped to death. If only there was a reliable way of knowing if a trend was going to continue or reverse at the moment of entry. Following the trend (regardless of how you define it) works great except when it doesn't. If you believe a trend can be defined in such a way as to lead to profitable trading over time, I would be interested in following your journal with live calls in the journal forum.
btw, having a trend following system that gets chopped out during choppy periods eventually leads to running two systems at once (one trend following, one mean reversion and/or counter trend) to try and take advantage of Parrondo's paradox, which also doesn't really work in trading. Please note that "choppy periods" is relative to the sensitivity of the trend definition, and not an objective term.
This makes sense. So "scalpers" are now basically just quick in and out traders, like swing trading but on a super short timeframe.
Sure. I have tons of DOM windows in front of me as I type this - and I am positive that for a point-and-click manual mouse trader to think that in the major futures markets he or she could buy bids and sell offers all day long ( and manage to flip each for a tic profit or at least scratch it ) would be "less than honest". Not consistently and not make a living at it. The bids and the offers just trade away too fast for you to scratch it. It seems like when a certain volume threshold is acheived on a best bid or best offer the entire balance gets swooped up immediately - if you look carefully, you can see the algos do it and then further away in the DOM you can see the covering orders immediately get placed. I do think the short timeframe swing trader analogy is an accurate one. Again, for me, the key to trading is timeframes.