Scalping is a trading style focused on exploiting extremely short-term price movements, where positions are typically held for only a few seconds to a few minutes.
Typical characteristics
- very high trade frequency
- tight risk limits (small stops, small targets)
- heavy focus on the order book, spread, volume, and micro-structure
Term
The term “scalping” is used for this kind of trading since the 19th-century. At stock markets, a scalper was a trader who tried to “pick off” very small price differences again and again — like shaving tiny pieces off the market, rather than taking big directional bets.
So the idea was:
- not “capture the whole move”
- but “skim small profits from many tiny fluctuations”