Is scalping the best way to trade?

I trade STIRS on Liffe and CME Eurodollars.
Usually 30-50 clip size.
 
I gave up daytrading cos it is tooo stressful. Also the more trades you do the more work you have to do to fill in the tax forms, so a 100 trades a day would be a nightmare for me!

Not saying I won't do one if I spot one though!
 
all spreads, only trade outrights when it is either instantly convertible to spread or if I am offside and trying to get out for something by being silly and taking a view, sometimes this ends up in worse loss.
 
twalker,

Has this last month been better than the previous one where you said that things had not been good ?


Paul
 
Thirteen,

Why ? You are based on Mars so you can dominate that world, and others can attempt to dominate Earth so there should be no need for you to fight for it.


Paul
 
on the spreads do you just sit on the bid and offer? or take a view of steepners and flatteners etc?
 
Imo there are several equally good ways to trade.

Properly done, scalping would surely be one of them. I'm probably at the other end of the spectrum with the program I write, making only several round trips per year.

jimmy1 said:
So we hear many people saying alot of the arcades are full of scalpers who make nice amounts of money... should this be the way forward i here myself think or do you think it is better to try to build systems to do lower volumes and get more ticks profit or loss
 
Trader333, Jun was a good month, April and May were not so good. Actually April was worst month I had in last year and that meant I covered all my costs but made +/- nothing on top. Market was quiet in April/May and I made a couple of volume trades that I should not have tried under those conditions.
Jimmy, I try no to take a view longer than the short term trend in the Bund. I try to not take direction into account much at all but if bund is strong I am less likely to be buying front spreads or selling backs or at least sitting on those bids and offers.
 
Has anyone bought the Vadym Graifer book in the link?Plenty about correlated markets I hope?(What about DOM/T&S)?
 
jonnyy40 said:
Has anyone bought the Vadym Graifer book in the link?Plenty about correlated markets I hope?(What about DOM/T&S)?

Yes I bought it a few weeks ago and was disappointed with it. It didn't teach me anything I didn't already know. There is some stuff in there about level two and time and sales but nothing very in depth that inspired me to learn anything new. Your opinion may be different but I have subsequently learnt a better way of scalping then presented in this book so it depends what you are expecting I guess. My advice would be not to bother.
 
Lots of interesting talk about "scalps", but here is an actual example this afternoon:
Shorted GILD 37.62
covered 37.42 three minutes later
for profit +20
Reasons were my own patterns and level 2 for the entry and the exit was reading the tape my own way. The latter suggested the down move had run out of steam - and it had because it bottomed at 37.41.
The point being that, imho, "scalping" successfully requires charting skills, pattern recognition, level 2 and reading the tape.
Richard

note: the first image is the exit, the second the entry
 

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I think it really depends what you define as scalping.
When scalping intramarket or calendar spreads, you just decide the range from a glance at a short term chart, I use 5 min, sell the upside, buy the downside, try to take 1-2 tics on each trade. Balls determine the clip size.
No real charting skills, just a couple of mental levels will do,
no pattern recognition required ,
I do not even know what people mean by Level2 , is this depth?
What on Earth is "the tape"?
Just showing my general ignorance here but I hope the point is clear.
Skill is in finding the nice range bound spread to scalp.
 
Twalker,
When you are scalping for 1-2 ticks in a range bound situation, do you go flat between positions? Or do you just constantly stay in and reverse at the edges of the range?

JO
 
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