What Is Scalping?
Scalping means holding positions for seconds to minutes and profiting from many small moves instead of one big one. What it demands in liquidity, fees and pair selection, where it fits among the four trading styles, and who you are really competing against.
Traders sort themselves mostly by holding time. Two people can trade the same pair, in the same week, profitably, in opposite directions, because one is trading the month's trend and the other is trading the next ninety seconds. The four commonly named styles, from slowest to fastest:
1. Position trading: weeks to months, sometimes years (not the same thing as investing),
2. Swing trading: several days to weeks,
3. Day trading: hours, closed by end of session,
4. Scalping: seconds to minutes.
This post is about the fourth, because it is what we do and what Osiris is built for.
The trade itself
A scalp is a bet on the immediate move: in, capture a fraction of a percent, out. No overnight exposure, no opinion about where the market will be next week. Just an entry, a nearby stop, and a target that is often hit or missed within a minute. Individually the profits are small. The strategy is volume: many trades, a small edge on each, compounding across a session. A scalper with a real edge and consistent execution can grow an account quickly precisely because the edge gets applied so many times.
That structure dictates the requirements.
Liquid pairs only. When your target is 0.3%, you cannot give up 0.2% of it crossing a thin spread. Scalping lives in the most liquid pairs, during the hours they are actually trading.
Fees decide viability. A fee of 0.05% per side is 0.1% per round trip, a third of that 0.3% target, paid on every single trade. Two strategies identical on the chart can land on opposite sides of profitability purely on the fee schedule, so scalpers care about maker rebates and fee tiers in a way swing traders never need to.
Selection speed is the edge before the edge. At any moment, a handful of the hundreds of listed perpetuals are moving in a tradeable way. The rest are noise. Finding the right ones by flipping through charts costs exactly the minutes the move needed. This is the problem Osiris exists to compress: the screener re-ranks the whole market in real time, so the pairs in play surface on their own.
Know who is on the other side
At this timescale your counterparties are increasingly not people. High-frequency and market-making bots execute thousands of orders a session, and on low timeframes they can move price on their own. This is not a reason to quit. Bots are mostly harvesting spreads, not hunting you personally. It is, however, a reason to be humble about speed. You will not out-click a machine. You can out-select it by trading the moments when real order flow overwhelms the algorithms, which is exactly when scalps work best. Reading the order book helps you see those moments coming, and that deserves its own post.
Scalping is honest work at high frequency: small edges, tight costs, relentless selection. If watching a market for hours suits you badly, it is the wrong style. The next post covers how to figure out which timeframe actually fits you.