Because I don’t see anyone on here doing it. I must have spent a day reading through the mad scalper thread, and I could’t draw a solid conclusion from it.
I would happily sit down every night for 3-4 hours and practice scalping, if I thought it was a road to long term success. I initially imagined that if I could become profitable swing trading, I might push along the equity curve faster if I did that also of an evening.
But where are all the experienced scalpers on here? Because as far as I can tell, the experienced people on this page do not do that.
I know some successful scalpers, but my take on it is that it’s usually much more difficult to do correctly than trading longer time frames, and as a result you don’t see many reputable ones around.
As it was mentioned before, scalping is more complicated trading style than swing trading. At the same time, scalpers are the most consistent traders - they expose thier accounts to risk only for a few minutes, so they are first who would be out of the market in case of any unexpected events. In other words, if they see something goes wrong (for example, volatility becames huge), they could just suspend trading and stay in cash waiting for the markets to calm down while swing traders would have to decide whether it would be better to close their positions or hold longer. Another important point is that risk per trade for the scalper is much lower than for swing trader. That is why the results of one particular trade are not such important.
It is also easier for the scalper to find interesting trading opportunities. Actually, experienced scalper could found and opportunity almost in any market conditions, that is the main advantage of scalping.
Despite all these advantages you should keep in mind that scalpers have to compete with HFTs operating at the same timeframes. This is quite difficult nowadays since scalping is mostly TA-based trading style with small discretion part, so the robots almost always perform better.
Consistently profitable scalpers (and all types of day-trader) are very thin on the ground.
We know from ESMA-required data from EU-based brokers that about 75% of their clients at any one time are losing money trading. I’m willing to bet money that most of the losers are scalping / day-trading. And they’re doing that because they can use tiny accounts and exit before the close - which they think are less risky.