Just curious to know if anyone here ~scalps multiple markets during the trading day. I am referring to a very short time frame for those who may be using charts, with holding periods that typically last from seconds to minutes, and seldom longer. If you trade more than one market in this manner, please post a comment. I'm not interested in your strategy. Rather, I'm interested in knowing the capacity of traders to trade multiple markets in this general manner. Even if you trade a single market in this manner, I welcome any comments you may have on the issue. Thanks.
My first trading successes were in tick-scalping equities. Learned so much about indicators, and news, and markets v. individual stocks. Phew! I'd screen by movement, and then by bid-ask spread/$price (as that was my use of capital).... I'd get a dozen or so, look for favorites (by which: those in which I had some market familiarity), and whittle those to 2-3, generally. So! With 2-3 4hr/1min screens, and a tacked-in-front Bid-Ask book/ladder from which to trade, I would stalk the spread, and nibble/work it as the indicators suggested opportunity. The more active one was, the less I would work the others. (So, maybe there was a limit on *my* Trades-per-minute rate! Hah!) A simultaneous profit-taker & stop-loss would be placed..... My vote: 2-3 to watch up close. (And anything held beyond an hour was then "an investment...!" I crack me up.)
Am in trades for last 50 minutes, testing/trading newer system for bigger profits, have the shakes as most of my trades over in 3.5 minutes or less. LOL
Whether I'm included among those you're asking depends on how strictly you're defining it. I'm not a scalper: none of my trades is ever over in "seconds". But many are closed within 5 -10 minutes. I look at NQ, CL, 6E and 6B (you can perhaps count that as three and a half different markets, allowing for the correlation between 6E and 6B).
Thanks for your responses. To be candid, I would have thought that following even 2 markets intensively in the general manner I described would be something of a challenge, let alone more. Perhaps it comes down to time frames or an innate ability of some people to ~multitask better than others. Or it might even come down to the simplicity of the method, although at this level I would think it's a given. I hope others will chime in with their views.
For literally what you described, for genuine scalping, I agree with you, for the most part. In forums generally (and perhaps in this one, in particular) people tend to use the word "scalping" very loosely, to describe any kind of "fast-moving (this term usually undefined) intraday trading". I appreciate, of course, that you're not one of them and meant scalping, when you said "scalping". So, technically I'm not a scalper, and probably shouldn't have replied in the first place - sorry. I suppose it varies a little, according to the method, as you say: people whose set-ups don't materialise so often, and who have some way of "seeing them coming" (or at least being on the alert for them) can monitor more markets, can't they? Example: a scalper who takes with-trend long trades (basing his entries on his precisely defined price action parameters, of course) only when his MACD-line is above both its midline and its signal-line ... when the latter condition isn't satisfied, he can perhaps keep tabs on a few additional markets, looking for an opportunity? (It's not how I trade, at all, but certainly there are people who do, and it could be a perfectly valid and reasonable gescheft, for someone who likes that kind of thing?) In other words, they have an "intermittently disqualifying, overriding, directional bias indicator" which is itself much slower-moving although their trades, when the parameters are right for them, are very fast-moving. I'd venture to suggest that the number of markets they can reasonably hope to monitor would be roughly in inverse proportion to the percentage of the time that their underlying directional bias indicator is fulfilled in each/most of those markets.
I wasn't referring to scalping in the literal trading sense, except perhaps as it relates to exiting losing trades, and generally employing fairly sensitive entry and exit criteria. I get your general point on directional bias, and I agree with you. Even so, as a rule of thumb, I would imagine that the more sensitive your entry and exit criteria are, the more constricted you will be in following additional markets. And since we all trade differently, even at the ~quasi-scalping level, thereby rendering a comparison as something of an apples-and-oranges proposition, I was curious to know the prevalence of trading multiple markets in a very short time frame.