[rollingstone]

Tend to agree with most of what you are saying Tzachi, although I do also like to use a swing trading system as well.

I have been trading on and off for the past 2 years and like everyone else have gone through all the timeframes and all the indicators and all the fibs, elliot wave etc.

My preferred timeframe used to be 30 or 60 minute charts, they give nice clean signals but the problem I find is that I tend to give back a lot of the gains in whippy days, I could never find a way around this.

The beauty I find with 1 minute charts is.

A) There are some nice obvious smooth trends when the market gets it into its head to move in one direction even for 20 or so pips, especially if you watch the market using H-A candles.

B) As you say, as long as you are not trading around economic news you can generally be fairly certain that any losses you have are going to be small.

C) Potential trade setups come along fairly regularly, generally at least 10 good setups per day across 5 currency pairs, sometimes more.

D) There are some nice opportunity to get what I call "second wave" trades, i.e. when you've had a small move then retraces a few pips then has another go. These I tend to find are the highest percentage trades.

E) The BEST thing I find is that it doesn't matter if the overall pair is trending or rangebound. On 30 / 60m charts if the pair is rangebound you can get whipped around.

But on 1 min charts a rangebound market is good as you can trade the moves up and down, a 30 minute rangebound market is still moving up and down between 30-50 pips.

And a trending market is good as you can catch the moves earlier, and even if you close out early you can catch the second and third "wave".

F) There are also some nice opportunities around data releases if you go with the flow and generally stay away from the most volatile (NFP), watching a data release on a 1 minute H_A chart gives very good opportunities to pull some pips.

The two thing I don't agree with you on is I wouldn't call this scalping, it's just short term intraday trading, even though on a closer view. The other thing is your targets of 3-5 pips, I shoot for a minimum of 10 pips per trade and close trades using technicals, so a trade can be 10 pips or 40 pips depending on the indicators, of course its also -10 pips sometimes.

True scalping is as you say in and out in 1-2 minutes, maybe seconds taking advantage of differences in quotes, 30 maybe 100 times a day, to do this you need a very small spread and very quick fingers, and generally to be working for a Bank etc where the £'s being traded make it worthwhile.

As I say I shoot for between 5-8 trades per day depending on opportunities, I tend to aim for 50 pips per day then shut up shop to protect it, but it's hard not to watch for more opportunities.

Sorry if I'm rambling.