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In today’s world of day trading, their is no shortage of traders searching for a successful scalp trading method. To be apart of this group, takes more than most people are willing to invest. Success can mean different things to different people, but to someone who trades, emini futures like the S&P, Dow or NASDAQ, being able to take a few points out of that market on most days, would fit the bill. That is not to say that you won’t have loosing days, it happens, but those losses are small when compared to the overall gains made during the week and months past.
One of the big benefits to being able to trade this way is, limited risk, at all times. Limiting ones risk is really the long term key of making this work. A trader can not let him or herself have a “blow up trading day”. This is when a trader just looses his judgment and makes one mistake after another. The biggest problem is lack of self control. Loosing control is one of, if not the worst mistake a day trader can make, while he is carving out his claim on the investing public.
Loosing control while day trading can be a death blow for your account and for your trading dreams. Traders are forced to face many unseen trading issues far beyond the point of entry and exit. If you do not have a scalp trading method that is in writing, with rules to follow, you can never be assured if you will be able to duplicate your success if you were to ever find it, even if it is temporary success as described above. To often, short term trading success can be very misleading and damaging to the trader who hopes to day trade for a living, if he is not prepared and aware of the unseen dangers.
Short term trading success can give a trader a false sense of security, as they may think they have mastered their trading techniques. Its only a matter of time, before they start spending the money they made from their trading in their mind. This right here is a real problem. To many traders dwell on the money they can make, writing down figures and sets of figures of all the combination’s and sizes. Their is a place and time for this, but to often, those thoughts turn into unfulfilled dreams. Those unfulfilled dreams then become a problem until itself, because as trading mistakes are made, it only exacerbates the reality that without a well written thought out trading method and accompanying scalp trading techniques, it is never going to happen.
I almost don’t even have to say the rest, because it only gets more painful. The harder you try in the flesh, the worst it gets. Taking action is not the problem, we have all done that, but stepping back and looking in objectively at what the real core issues are, is what is needed. This often never happens, because the work involved is again to steep a price to pay. We may not say that consciously, but subconsciously our minds are working hard, lining up with our dominant thoughts and thinking overall.
If you find yourself saying “I can’t believe I did it again”, you know you have a problem and you need to fix it before you go on. Most traders just ignore this, by trying to justify their actions in some form or another. This is not going to get fixed by itself. You will have to be your own trading coach and really dig deep inside yourself and examine basic thoughts about how you view money and or your lack of it. This gets deep right here, and I would need more time to get into that one, but for the sake of time, I am will move on.
If you are under-capitalized, this can be adding to the list of issues. It is hard and or nearly impossible to day trade with money you cannot afford to loose. No one likes to think they are going to loose money and no one thinks that it is going to happen to them, until it does. Then, now again, are more issues. You say, “I thought I was ready, I don’t know what happened”.
As mentioned, you likely only had a rough idea in your mind of how you were going to execute your trading strategy, again, with no written plans. If you found success, how are you going to be able to duplicate it going forward, month after month with no blue print to follow. Scalp trading, can be simple, but it is never easy. It can be very rewarding, not only with money, but with time, the time you now have to do other things.
Being able to “Day Trade for a Living” using scalp trading techniques that are proven to be effective over time, no matter the market condition is yet another key. A trending market or a choppy market, it does not matter, because the trader who masters the art of scalp trading is trading a method, not a system.
A trading method allows for changing conditions and a trader can easily adjust for it. A trading system tries to remove the human element from the equation, which it almost rarely ever happens. You become vulnerable to large draw downs and are basically not in control. I could never trade that way. I would be putting my faith in a back tested program that has likely not accounted for all variables. Thus you become a dependent trader instead of a “Independent trader”.
Volumes could be said, just on a few of these topic’s, all of which are so important to making all your trading dreams a reality. In closing, keep your trading dream alive, only by making the hard choices that you know you must take to make it so.
I wish the best for my readers !
Friday’s trades: Two sets, -1 tick / & +3 ticks, +7 ticks, +11 ticks /
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