Dozens of trades a day only works when your edge per trade clears the cost stack. Here is the arithmetic before the strategy.
Key takeaways
- Scalping profits come from tiny moves repeated many times, so transaction costs dominate.
- Liquidity and spread matter more than pattern selection.
- Execution latency and order type discipline are part of the edge, not an afterthought.
Scalping means taking many trades a day and holding for seconds to minutes, harvesting very small moves. The mathematics is unforgiving: if your average gross gain is small, the round-trip cost — brokerage, exchange charges, GST, STT and slippage — can consume most of it.
That makes instrument selection the first decision. Scalpers work where spreads are one tick and depth is deep: index futures, the most liquid index option strikes, and the top MCX contracts. Illiquid stock options are where scalping strategies die quietly.
Execution quality is the second. Market orders in a fast tape cost more than the pattern is worth; limit orders miss fills at exactly the wrong times. Most consistent scalpers use limits for entry, market for exit, and accept a lower hit rate in exchange for controlled slippage.
Finally, scalping is physically demanding. A hundred decisions a day degrades judgement by mid-session. Traders who last set a trade count ceiling and stop when they hit it, regardless of how the day is going.
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