Hi Everyone,
I've been dipping in and out of this subreddit for a while now and to be honest I've been quite critical. I feel there is a lot of miss-information flowing between new traders and not a lot of direction that will actually help people trade. This is my attempt at offering something back.

Scalping & Why You Should Care

Every trade starts as a scalp. You're looking for a good entry and you want the market to move on side as quickly as possible. Regardless of what trading you want to do, you should learn to scalp.
Scalping is the art of reading the order flow and identifying short term momentum. It's not 1 tick 100 trades a day. Unless you're a bot or a massive player, you're expecting to make 2 - 8 ticks (more in illiquid markets) and you're absolutely not setting a designated profit & loss taker.

What Moves The Market

Size. For the most part, it's big players throwing a lot of money in one direction that moves the market. Their action at 1 price point might dictate the direction of the market for the next hour. More often than not, it dictates the direction until they hit someone else big who pushes it back the other way. Retail traders are just following the wave created by the big players. That is the essential part of scalping.
Have you ever wondered why the market can move so sharply in one direction for an hour and yet still close the day only a few points off where it started? That's a large player selling the market down and then maybe even the same player buying it all the way back up again. You can't predict that in a swing trade. You didn't know that player was going to turn up that day to do that. This is why scalping is an effective way of trading, because I don't care who turns up or what they do as they do something to move the market for me.

How Do You See Big Players?

Order flow is the only way you're going to trade this effectively. I know many of you like to use charts, but you cannot do this effectively with them. Let me show you why.
Below is a trade I took today in the treasuries. On the left is ZN and the right ZB. I also have ZF off to the left, but wanted to cut down the size of the screenshot.
If you've never seen a DOM, this will look confusing. I suggest going and watching a video from John Grady on the DOM, I can't explain it better than he can. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viBGTEGFF1k&t=238s
The screenshot below shows you what you can't see in charts. In real time, I can see a big player finally crushing through the edge of the volume profile after 40 minutes of teasing with it. If you entered earlier, you got wiped out when the market drove up. If you were watching the order flow, you knew that was likely to happen because you could see sellers fatiguing on the edge of the profile and they needed a retracement before going back through it.
This screenshot is the essence of scalping. I don't make the trade decision, the big guy did. All I did was decide to join him for the ride.
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https://preview.redd.it/qy2k0pfu5aw51.png?width=1214&format=png&auto=webp&s=de06b04e484d67824d0b8a231658805512d0dc85
The market dropped 11 ticks very quickly from this point. That's $30 per tick. I didn't grab all of that, but I got a decent pay out.
To exit my trade I looked for the opposite conditions that lead me to join it in the first place. A big buyer stepping up to slow and halt the market fall. In this case I actually got out a bit early, but the beauty of scalping is that I can keep jumping in and out as long as I've got momentum.
You won't see that big buyer in your chart, because you won't see the 5k contracts printing in at 1 price point where they've dug their heels in. By the time you've made the decision from your chart, the market has already moved against you.
If this trade hadn't pushed any lower, I would have exited immediately. I might have taken a 1 tick loss. That means I would have been risking 1 tick to make upwards of 11.

Closing thoughts

In my opinion, I don't believe TA really works. I don't believe it works because of what I see when I trade in the DOM and I know TA isn't showing that.
I do believe that some people have a natural gift with charts and they're essentially reading this price action through the bar jumping up and down. I'm sure it can be done, but I also believe it's a lot easier to just view the data in the DOM in the first place.
There are no indicators for what I've shown you in that screenshot. Even if there was, by the time you've checked 3 indicators you've missed that move. Jumping on that move after it's gone is dangerous. That market may have only dropped 3 ticks and rallied right up against you.
Finally, if you open a trade and it doesn't start moving your way, you didn't get the right entry. You can't get it every time and that's why we scratch trades. It doesn't have to move instantly with you, but if you can't see momentum going your way then scratch for a commission cost and move on. Wait for that big player.
I didn't make money until I forced myself to only trade when I see size on that DOM. That size only really appears during the open hours as well, so now I only trade the open 2 hours.
If you got this far down, thanks for reading. I hope it helped.

I am trying to scalp weeklies with stop loss 30% and profit 30%. Since it's weekly, I mostly trade within the same day to avoid being fucked by theta. The thing is, most of the time I hit my -30% lose before even hitting the greens (AKA buying calls at the top).
On Monday I lost 50k (-80%) just from these trades after hitting -30%, aside from the gay puts, my calls would have been green if I had held just couple more hours. What are the odds of getting clapped by 4 different trades? Win rate is 0%.
I need a better plan, but it seems options prices are just so volatile that -30% will be hit within the same day. What did I do wrong?
Do you guys just diamond hand it through? trading smaller size with longer DTE?
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https://preview.redd.it/8hzvrayqwys51.png?width=1528&format=png&auto=webp&s=31db0a2f7767c02371813c67fe9eda6b896bb43e

Right, so RIP Walmarts in Ontario, Canada. This is so savage. But I do have some good news. I chatted with an associate today that mentioned the vendor that sells Pokemon products (At least in this area but I'm imagining its the same vendor in the states too) is planning to fit locked glass shelves in (much like the gaming department). They're no longer allowing people to buy in person more than a few items and they will have to ask an associate to gain access to the shelves. This person also said that they've been having a horrible time with theft on the cards since interest peaked. I'm really hoping this might slow down the local scalping situation.
Here's a pic of my local Walmart ... they even took everything that used to be by the register. Either way, I'm happy to have my local card shop.
https://preview.redd.it/vibzddiclax51.png?width=2480&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e7ac508dce02bea2068f34eab0338eec55ee772