Scalp

### What a scalp really is A scalp is a trade whose entire edge lives inside the noise. You are not trading a move, you are trading the flicker between the bid and the ask. Positions last seconds to minutes and the target is a few pips in forex or a few cents in stocks, repeated many times a day. The classic scalper's mechanic is to *make the spread*, buying at the bid and selling at the ask, which is closer to what a market maker does than what a directional trader does. That is the part beginners miss. Scalping is not a faster version of swing trading. It is a different business, and what you are really selling is liquidity, not analysis. ### The cost maths that quietly kills it Your cost is charged on every single trade, and it is charged before price does anything. Work it through. If the spread or commission is 2 pips and you are aiming for a 5 pip reward, you give up 2 by default, so the win you are actually chasing is 3. That ratio is the whole game. The smaller your target, the bigger the slice of it your broker takes before you are even right. Then it gets worse, because costs are not constant: - Variable spreads widen in fast conditions, which is exactly when your setup fires and exactly when you want out. - Slippage on entry and exit is a second cost that never appears on the chart. - Frequency multiplies both. Trading many times a day means paying the toll many times a day. This is what *low per-trade expectancy* means in practice. There is so little room between your cost and your target that you have almost no margin for a bad fill, a slow hand, or one revenge click. ### Do not misread the 2026 rule change US traders keep hearing that the gate is gone. It is. FINRA's Regulatory Notice 26-10 eliminated the "pattern day trader" designation and the $25,000 minimum equity requirement for day trading, effective 4 June 2026, replacing them with [intraday margin requirements](https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/intraday-margin-requirements), with firms allowed to phase in until 20 October 2027. But read what replaced it. FINRA now expects a margin account to hold adequate equity *throughout the trading day* rather than only at the close, stating a minimum equity level of 25 percent of the current market value of the long margin-eligible equity securities in the account, and it says repeated failure to satisfy an intraday deficit can restrict the account for up to 90 days. So the regulator removed a capital gate. It did not remove the spread, the commission, or the slippage. Those costs were never a function of the $25,000, and they do not care that it is gone. ### Why our system does not scalp We hold 15M to 1H setups with a 1.7RR minimum for one structural reason: at that target size, costs are a small fraction of your reward rather than a large slice of it. You get room to read the chart, place a real stop at your protected structure, and let the reward side of the maths do work that a few pips can never do. Scalping asks the opposite of you. It demands a high win rate, flawless execution, and constant screen time, and it punishes every lapse immediately. Know the term, respect it, and understand why it is not the tool we hand you.