*Originally published in French on objectifeco.com, February 21, 2012. The site was purged in 2016; this text survives only in the Internet Archive. Snapshot. Translated, not rewritten: what follows is the original argument as it was made, including what time has since proven wrong. Where that happens, you'll find a note from the desk, dated 2026.*
2nd Advantage
The second advantage of this particular breed of successful trader is that it's far simpler for them to take a proper holiday.
This might sound like a minor point, but it comes up as a constant in every account you hear from traders who actually succeed: I trade, I make money, I carry a heavy weight of pressure, I need time off.
And the scalper is the type who finds it easiest to switch off the screen and put the mouse down for a while. Everyone else carries this nagging sense that something huge is going to happen while they're away, and they won't be there to catch it.
What's more, and this is worth being precise about, among scalpers themselves, it's the ones who favour quiet markets who switch off the most, and the best. I can see it in the quality of their trading when they come back. They're often perfectly rested, perfectly sharp. The moment they're back, they're fully operational again, and I'd go further: their best stretches often come in the weeks right after their holiday.
It's a very different story for the ones who work the choppy phases. For them, there's a short readjustment period, and coming back is often a bit rocky on the results side. If I can offer a personal view: I think they, like a lot of traders, never quite manage to leave the screen behind entirely, telling themselves that whatever happens while they're away doesn't matter. So the quality of their rest suffers, and it shows on the way back: frustration, the urge to make up for lost time, and so on.
3rd Advantage
A third undeniable advantage over every other category of trader: their gains come in more regularly. In reality, they're the only traders with any real consistency at all.
Plenty of traders tell me: "I can never know when my work is going to pay off. I apply my technique, but sometimes the markets just aren't there for it. It won't budge. The gains don't show up. And then, at other times, it pays."
As a rather biased observer, I can confirm this happens, and you'll understand why better by the end of this series. In the markets there are periods of real strength, where the winners take big money, and then there's the rest of the time, when almost everyone is bored stiff.
Scalpers are a small exception to that. It's obvious enough why: the ideal market conditions for their style of trading to pay off come around far more often. It's a mathematical certainty. The shorter you cut the time horizon, the more you segment the market, the more favourable windows you're going to find.
Desk note, 2026: A reader called Virgile pushed back on this in the comments the same week: more opportunities in scalping also means more false signals. He wasn't wrong , the regularity comes from the sheer frequency of occasions and the averaging that follows, not from some magic edge baked into the short timeframe itself.
One important detail all the same: if scalpers post more regular results than winning traders as a whole, the best scalpers are themselves still victims of real swings in their own results. They tend to put it this way: "Right now I'm technically sharp, in great physical shape, and it shows in my trading." On top of that, it's a virtuous circle, and, without letting it go to your head, confidence really does matter to success.
Doesn't that remind you of a few comments you've heard before?
Drawback
The major drawback that comes up in every single conversation with a scalper is the sheer fatigue of the exercise. With positions this short, you have to be running at close to 100% of your capacity almost the whole time. There's very little pause between entry and exit, and between one position and the next.
Ask them stress or fatigue, and the answer is always the same: "I'm lucky enough to feel fairly little stress doing this, because I think what actually causes stress is carrying a position. But after every trading session, I'm as physically drained as if I'd just run a marathon."
And you know what? Well. It's at that exact point that every single one of them, without exception, adds: "And to keep it up, I have to train." For some it's cardio, for others it's the gym, or running. But they all have this in common: to excel at scalping, the body has to be able to keep up with the mind.
It reminds me of those elite poker players who all insist on their physical conditioning to get them through a tournament, don't you think?
Part of a series. This article belongs to Trading Styles: Every One Sends You a Bill. Related: Scalping: Trying to Win Small, Very Often and Win Rate and Streaks: Why It Takes 300 Trades. Background: spread in the Ouinex glossary.
About the author. Samuel Rondot has traded financial markets since 1995 and is self-taught. He wrote a book on technical analysis, published a long run of trading columns between 2009 and 2016, and now runs the algorithmic trading desk at Ouinex.
Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss.
