https://brookstradingcourse.com/ask-al/ ... nt-scalps/
It really depends on what you’re doing. On a day like this, there are probably 20 stop-entry scalps for one point, but there were probably a whole bunch of other one-point stop-entry scalps that were losers. And to make money over time, scalping for one point, risking one point — if you do the math, if you’re just risking one point, you have to be right probably 60 percent of the time. However, if you’re only risking one point for a one-point scalp, then it’s hard to win 60 percent of the time because very often you’ll get an entry — let’s say a buy — and it pulls back but does not go below the low of the bar. It pulls back more than four ticks, so a lot of the trades will not go beyond the signal bar, but they’ll fall — they’ll come back four or five or six ticks.
So the math is really hard. I know it’s very appealing to try to minimize risk. When traders start out, their first thought is, “Oh, my gosh, I work so hard to get enough money to open an account. I really don’t want to blow this chance. This is my one big chance.” And the safest way, the most logical way for me to do this is to reduce my risk, so I have to use a very, very tight stop. However, when traders focus so much on one of the three variables, they don’t focus adequately on the others, and
if a trader starting out is really concerned about risk, that means he’s probably not paying enough attention to probability, and that’s where traders lose money.
So they don’t realize just how important probability is, and most of the setups that you have during the day are 40 to 60 percent setups, and if you start going for one point scalp with a one point profit target, you have to be really good at picking all the 60 percent setups and avoiding the 55 percent setups and the 52 percent setups. And it’s just hard to do. Your margin for error is so small.
Scalping for one point using a one-point stop, and just doing it with stop entries — you have to be perfect; you have to be really perfect, and I think that is unreasonable to expect from a person who’s starting out.