Trend / Momentum
Momentum Scalping
Momentum scalping means taking many small, fast trades on short bursts of price acceleration, holding for seconds to a couple of minutes, and relying on trade frequency instead of any one big win.
Run a 60-second session
The tape ticks roughly seven times a second. The momentum meter tracks the 10-tick rate of change, how far price has moved over the last ten ticks. Click Enter when you think a burst is building, Exit to close it. Every round trip costs the friction amount set below, subtracted from that trade's result whether it wins or loses.
Flat
How it works
- Momentum is measured, not felt. The meter is the price ten ticks ago subtracted from the price now. A reading near zero means the tape is chopping sideways. A reading pushing toward the green or red edge means price has been moving in one direction for the last second and a half or so.
- One position at a time, entry to exit. Enter locks in the current tick price. Exit closes it and books the gross result, the exit price minus the entry price, before any costs.
- Friction is charged on every round trip. A fixed cost, set by the slider, is subtracted from each closed trade regardless of whether it won or lost. Real friction is the bid-ask spread you cross and slippage on a fast fill, not a hypothetical.
- Net is what's left after all of it. The scoreboard tracks gross points captured, total friction paid, and net. At ten, twenty, thirty trades in sixty seconds, that per-trade cost gets paid that many times, and the net column can fall well behind the gross column even on a winning session.
Where this breaks
Friction compounds faster than the edge at high frequency
A scalper's per-trade edge is usually small on purpose, a few ticks captured from a short burst, repeated often. That works only as long as the average gain per trade clears the average cost per trade by enough to matter. Run the simulator above with the friction slider near zero and take a dozen trades, then reset and run the same length session with friction near the top of the range. The gross column barely changes between runs, since it is driven by the same kind of momentum bursts either way. The net column does not survive the second run nearly as well, because every one of those dozen round trips paid the higher cost regardless of whether that individual trade won. Raise the trade count and the same math gets worse faster: frequency is a cost multiplier as much as it is an opportunity multiplier, and at scalping speed the cost side often wins the race.