I think scalping is sustainable. It all depends on the expectancy of your system and self-control.

I only trade the NQ and scalping is what I do from 9:30-10AM, sometimes 10:30AM max if there is a lot of volatility and the market is trending strongly. I take about 2-4 trades max with the size of only 1 contract during this period if the market is volatile enough for me to take trades on a certain day. If there is no volatility, I don't trade that day. I used to trade eagerly, wanting to make money everyday even if it wasn't volatile enough for me. But, I learned the lesson that the market is not a daily annuity for some people the hard way, and I will explain later in my post.

My current system has 50% win rate and my reward to risk ratio is 2:1, so my profits are 2x larger than my losses if a trade works in my favor. I do this by using bracket orders with pre-defined tick amounts for the stop loss and profit target. My current system has worked well for me and I am very comfortable trading it. However, there is a catch. If I have 2 consecutive losses, I stop trading for the day. If I have two consecutive winning trades, I stop trading for the day. If I make 3-4 trades and I roughly breakeven, I stop trading for the day. These three rules are to specifically protect me from overtrading, greed, impatience, and revenge trading. These rules also help me stay profitable. If I stick to them, I make money. If I don't stick to them, I lose money.

The three evils for a scalper, in my opinion, are: greed, impatience, and overtrading. I say this because I have experienced it. I used to sling for a high win-rate system, overtrade, make bad entries, not trade around key support/resistance levels, trade in a choppy low-volatility market, revenge trade, etc. The result of this, I blew up an account. My greed was unchecked. I had no patience, no discipline, and no clear system with strict rules. However, I am grateful for that experience because it made me better and pushed me in the right direction.

I still make mistakes and my system is not perfect, but it works for me and will have to adapt if it becomes unprofitable. So, in conclusion, I think scalping is sustainable but with strict rules against your human nature. But, for some people, like me, account blowups can teach you this and I never want to trade like that again.

How many points or ticks are you shooting for on your profit target?

Sometimes I risk 50 for 100 ticks. Sometimes I risk 100 for 200 ticks. Sometimes 250 for 500 ticks. Sometimes I only risk 25 for 50 ticks. It all depends on the volatility of the period.

For example, recently my stops and targets have been much wider, i.e. 100 for 200. Bearish news and fear of the market being so high has caused NQ to be extremely volatile. So wider stops are wiser in my opinion. I say this because if you have tight stops you'll get chopped out right away.

How about you?

I ask because I'm kind of a mess at this!!!

Right now I'm doing 40-50 ticks of risk and 40-100 ticks on profit target depending on market structure for on where to put my target. Best I got right now...

I like the idea of using volatility, makes sense to me. Are you using ATR? If so, on your main chart? daily?

Hi!
I find quite interesting who you use bollinger with Cumulative Delta and with price and I have done a couple of strategies with Bloodhound. In the first one I use a 15 min timeframe chart for setting the bias (long or short) and a 1 min chart with Dynamic SR for entries. The bollinguer with Cumulative Delta did not work well and I used Bollinger with price only.
In the second strategy I used a 500 vol. Line break chart. It seems to work too well to be true, do you or anybody know if Line break charts repaint as renko? I you want me to share more detail of the strategies I have done, I donīt mind to share it with you... the ideas are coming from you.
Thank you.

Hi,

Did you do any more testing on the second strategy? What were your thoughts?

(had to remove the images from the quoted post as I am new!)