For many years, traders have done the traditional way of trading, which is usually day trading or swing trading, which means holding a position for longer than one trading day and less than 1 trading year. But in recent years technology has advanced a lot compared to 40 years ago. Faster internet means faster executions of trades. 40 years ago, traders had to call their broker by phone just to execute a position, and today you just click a button.
With all the new advancements towards faster trading, traders naturally adapted and also started trading faster. Instead of holding a position for hours, traders switched to holding them for minutes. Today, there are traders that hold positions for less than a minute.
Yes, it is possible to have a profitable long-term edge in the market while only holding positions for minutes or less than a minute, but it is extremely risky and stressful as you can imagine. In high-speed conditions like this, even the smallest mistake can have drastic consequences. It can be a lot size that is slightly off, a stop loss that’s a few pips bigger or an internet connection that decided to have some buffers for 10 seconds. All the mistakes I just mentioned is deadly for an account and that’s why trading conditions matter.
These traders choose only the best of the best when it comes to brokers and liquidity providers. This is often also why these scalpers use trading robots; it is to help negate risk and make everything as consistent as possible.
Now, I would never recommend anyone to do scalping especially beginners, but unfortunately beginners are the first ones to run towards this strategy. The whole idea of seeing that result in seconds sounds very appealing to them, because they don’t have to wait hours or days.
In reality, they make themselves more impatient by trading so quick because they are feeding their dopamine rather than executing trades based on a trading system. This is essentially just gambling for most. I would say the best strategy for almost anyone would be swing trading. You take much less trades, you will have a higher win rate most of the time and mistakes are far less deadly than they are for a scalper.
Day trading is also a better option as you can still get best of both worlds, but of course it is still difficult and does still require loads of patience. Just ensure that you are following a set of rules consistently and you’ll make any one of these strategies work in the long run.
(Just my opinion, not financial advice)