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Trading Strategies

What Is Scalping

Scalping is trading at the scale of minutes: a trade opened and closed inside a few minutes, for a move of a dollar or two on gold, repeated many times in a day. This paper shows you one hour of real five-minute bars from 5 November 2025 and the moves inside it, the idea as a stopwatch, the same afternoon on the chart, how a typical two-dollar move compares with the spread at two trade sizes, and the timeframe bar and one-click setting on your platform.

Difficulty
Beginner
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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One hour, in pieces of a dollar or two

Scalping is trading at the scale of minutes. Here is the scale, from real five-minute bars: gold from 15:00 to 16:00 on 5 November 2025. The whole hour ran from 3964.81 to 3979.45, fifteen dollars top to bottom, in pieces of a dollar or two. The largest piece was 8.18 in the ten minutes from 15:15 to 15:25; a typical ten minutes that day moved 2.13. A scalp is a trade opened and closed inside one of those pieces, and a scalper makes many of them in a day.

A stopwatch

Picture a stopwatch. A scalp is a trade timed in minutes: in at 15:15, out at 15:25, the whole of it inside the shaded ten minutes on the face. What the price does over the day or the week is not its business, because the trade is closed long before either has played out. That is the defining thing about scalping. It is not the market and not the method; it is the length of the trade, measured on a stopwatch rather than a calendar.

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