Scalping
Scalping is the fastest trading style: dozens of trades a day holding seconds to minutes for small, frequent profits.
Scalping holds positions for seconds to minutes, taking many small profits a day. It is execution-driven: tight spreads, fast platforms and low commissions decide whether the edge survives.
Scalping is a trading style that holds positions for seconds to a few minutes, aiming to capture small price moves many times a day. Scalpers trade the tightest spreads and the highest leverage of any style, and execution quality, platform speed and commission structure decide whether the style is profitable. It is the most demanding style: dozens of decisions a day, each with a thin edge.
How It Works
- Trades the smallest timeframes, often 1-minute to 5-minute charts
- Relies on the spread, commission and execution being cheap enough to overcome
- Frequent small wins with occasional larger losses
Trading Tips
The spread is your biggest cost - raw accounts with commission are usually cheaper for scalpers
News spikes are danger zones: slippage can erase a day of small edges
Most retail scalpers fail on costs, not on signals
Scalping Example
Say you buy EUR/USD at 1.0850 and exit at 1.0853, three pips, twenty times a day. At $10 a pip per lot that is $30 a scalp before costs, so a 0.5-pip all-in cost decides whether the day ends green or red.
How Traders Use Scalping
Scalp only where execution is elite: raw spreads, fast fills, commissions you have measured. Backtest the costs first, because a strategy that wins 60% of scalps still loses if the round trip eats the edge.
Related Terms
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