To throw some light on the original question of
swing v scalp I thought I'd share these articles from Peter's blog which are quite informative to answering this dilemma.
I've picked out the articles that best highlight the market characteristics and tendencies of swing markets:
http://www.betangel.com/blog_wp/tag/swing-trade/
http://www.betangel.com/blog_wp/?s=day+of+the+drifter
Yesterday after I finished trading for the day I was sitting and reading some old posts and the one titled 'Day of the drifter' caught my eye. In the article Peter mentions about a predominant feature in that Monday’s horse racing market where things were just drifting a lot that day and that you could have picked up on this pattern and avoided scalping.
I also want to share a few thoughts on some of the things James1st mentioned earlier:
James1st wrote:
Specifically with scalping, you can never rely on a stable market remaining stable enough for long enough to allow you to make a decent profit and even in those races that do stay stable for considerable periods (eg long odds on shots) you will not get much money through the market due to the very large volumes at each price point.
Absolutely right James. I can relate this point with a recent Chester meeting over a 3 day period last week. 2 of those days were stable enough while 1 of those days was very different and if you relied on the market to remain stable for long you were bound to get hurt as I realized first-hand.
James1st wrote:
...in EVERY race the market moved between 5 and 10 ticks (a few 20's) which demonstrates that "static" races like your example is indeed a unique event.
James has it right again, and i have little to add, but in a few days time I will post an image to visually illustrate this. I have only a small sample of data so it may not be perfectly accurate but i think it is decent enough in highlighting a general market movement tendency.
