From one newbie to the other, I’ll give my opinion here: As others - specifically @flamingoproxy - have told you, scalping not a money-making business for most retail traders. You have to cover your spread first on any trade. This means you are starting out in the hole already and your trade has to play catch up. Scalping is going after pip amounts in the single digits with equally tiny stop losses. A tiny stop loss leaves no room for movement. A five pip stop will get you stopped out in a few seconds many times. So, if you are looking to scalp 5 pips on a 1:1, if that candle makes a sudden move the other way, you’re out. Forget trying to do 2:1 or 3:1 with scalping You’ll be stopped out in less than a second.
In scalping, you’re also trading very fast charts - which are mostly noise - and you have to spend the whole day glued to those charts looking for trades. So instead of taking one or two good trades to get 10 or 20 pips, you have to take 10 or even more trades to get there. In the US, the average spread on major pairs is 1 pip. So you have to make 6 pips to make 5. Remember - you HAVE TO COVER YOUR SPREAD! So, if you’re taking 10 trades you’re paying 10 pips in spread. If you’re walking away with 10 pips at the end of it - you’ve only broke even. It begs the question: why bother?
A 10 - 20-pip take profit is not a scalp trade. It’s a day trade.
The other issue is the vast majority of scalping strategies out there involve some form of moving average crossover, usually backed up by one of the following: RSI, Stochastic, MACD, or ADX. These strategies sound great, except for two major points:
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Moving averages, and indicators like RSI, etc., etc., etc. are lagging. By the time these indicators give you the buy or sell signal, it’s often too late.
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If you don’t understand price action and candlestick patterns, and blindly trade any strategy - whether it be for scalping, day, swing or position trading), you’re going to lose more often than win and lose bigger than your wins. Example: RSI over 70 is overbought. So in a typical moving average crossover, when you get the prescribed cross-over and the RSI comes down from over 70, sell, sell, sell!!! Because that’s what the strategy tells you to do. But guess what? RSI can cross back up. Now what? You’ve been faked out.
The bottom line is, you need to put your time in on demo accounts learning how to trade well and learning your broker’s system. I don’t believe in grand conspiracy theories against retail traders - we do ourselves in with bad trades all on our own.