Is Scalping Legal?

Scalpers seek to profit from small market movements, taking advantage of a ticker tape that never stands still. For years, this fast-fingered day-trading crowd relied on Level 2 bid/ask screens to locate buy and sell signals, reading supply and demand imbalances away from the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO)—the bid/ask price that the average person sees. They would buy when…

Forex scalping involves trading currency pairs over very short timeframes, in high numbers. A lot of forex scalpers will focus on high volatility events around economic data and breaking news, where large market moves are almost guaranteed. A standard lot in forex is the equivalent of 100,000 units of the base currency, but thanks to…

Since scalping involves very short holding periods, the main risk is that the price of a stock will move against a trade in the very short term. To minimize this risk, scalpers often set tight stop-loss orders to exit a trade quickly if it goes against them.

Place a 5-8-13 simple moving average (SMA) combination on the two-minute chart to identify strong trends that can be bought or sold short on counter swings, as well as to get a warning of impending trend changes that are inevitable in a typical market day. This scalp trading strategy is easy to master. The 5-8-13 ribbon will align, pointing…

While investors hold stocks for years, and even position traders hold them for months, scalpers would have a position on a stock for just minutes or seconds. A stock scalper might buy a large volume of stocks, wait for a tick upwards – or short a stock and wait for a small tick downward –…

Scalping is a short-term trading strategy that seeks to profit from small price movements in stocks throughout the day. Scalpers may be high-frequency traders who enter and exit several trades within a matter of minutes or even seconds, trying to capitalize on fleeting market inefficiencies, liquidity imbalances, and volatility. The goal of scalping is to accumulate a…