Back in the 80's and 90's scalpers typically made hundreds of trades a day.  They were basically playing the fraction spread.  I wasn't trading back then, but that sounds like a pain in the ass.  Who really wants to have their face planted 2" from the computer screen trying to scalp a 1/4 or 1/2 point dozens of times every hour?  Can you imagine all the commissions?  Today, scalping is kind of similar… it's become a little more difficult to "scalp" with equities since we've gone to the decimal scale.  I've spoken to e-mini traders who try and scalp a 1/2 – 2 points on the ES (S&P 500 e-mini).  At the end of the day they could have as many as 30-50 trades!  With $4 round-turns per contract that can be a hefty load!  Say you net 5-7 points at the end of the day (which most traders can't), your commission eats all your profit!

I define "pivot-to-pivot" trading as looking to make anywhere from 3-7 points on average on any given trade.  The time it takes for a trade that size to play out is about 1-8 minutes.  About 25% of the time, the trade fails to develop and is cut short.  The other 75% of the time we usually get a pop in our direction about 1-2 points.  While most traders would be ecstatic with 1-2 points average on a trade, we typically look to hold for our main targets, which are a minimum of 3-5 points away.  We typically get about 6-14 high probability set ups in the average trading day.  All we need to catch is a couple good trades to be very profitable.  

Here's an example of a real DTP high probability, pivot-to-pivot trade from today.  Many of our students were able to catch this with nice precision:

If the short was entered at 822 and covered at 818, the trader would have made 4 points or ($50 per point x 4= $200).  This trade took about 3 minutes to play out… with 5 contracts, that's $1000 in 3 minutes!  

With this kind of potential, why the hell would anyone want to hold positions over night?  I talk to traders almost every day who say, "I know it's a bad habit, but I just know the market is going up/down tomorrow".  Ha… don't even get me started on people who try and guess where the market might go tomorrow.  I don't care and neither should you!

No matter what style of trading you play, make sure you have solid technical reasons for entering, managing, and exiting trades.  The absolute WORST thing you can do as a trader is try and guess where the market will go on a tick-by-tick, minute-by-minute, or day-by-day basis.  If you try to "beat" the market, it will eat you alive!