1-Minute Scalping: Rules and Costs
1-minute scalping is day trading on one-minute candles, holding each position for seconds to a few minutes and aiming for moves of a few cents or ticks. Because the targets are so small, the spread and commission take a large share of every trade, and the rules exist mainly to keep that cost under control.
The one-minute chart is the fastest timeframe most platforms show by default, and it is where the arithmetic of trading costs is harshest. This page sets out the rules that style needs and shows the cost calculation that explains every one of them.
How it works
Each candle covers one minute of trading. A 6.5-hour regular US stock session therefore prints 390 of them, and a scalper on this chart is trying to catch a handful of cents, or a few ticks on a futures contract, inside a few of those bars.
Entries come from short-term signals: a break of the last few bars’ high, a bounce off a fast moving average or VWAP, or a pullback into a level marked on a slower chart. The signal differs by teacher; the holding time does not. Positions last seconds to minutes, and most traders close everything before the session ends.
The stop and target are fixed in cents or ticks before the entry. There is no time to decide them while the trade is open, and the whole method depends on the gap between them.
What makes this style different from ordinary scalping is the scale. A one-minute bar moves less than a five-minute bar, so the target shrinks, while the bid-ask spread and commission stay exactly the same size.
The rules the costs force
Trade only the most liquid instruments. A spread of one cent on a heavily traded stock or index future is a cost you can plan around; a spread of five cents on a thin one is larger than most one-minute targets.
Trade only the busiest hours. Around the open, and during the overlap of major sessions on futures, bars are wider and spreads tighter. In quiet hours the same cost is a bigger share of a smaller bar.
Set the target from costs, not from the chart. The distance to the target has to cover the round trip and still leave the planned reward, and the distance to the stop has to be sized knowing the round trip is added to every loss.
Cap the number of trades. Every trade pays the round trip whether it wins or not, so a daily cap is a cost limit as much as a discipline rule.
Size from the stop. Divide the money you are prepared to lose on one trade by the stop distance plus the round trip, which is the real loss per share. Position sizing covers the arithmetic.
A worked example
Take a hypothetical stock with a one-cent spread and a commission of half a cent per share each way. Crossing the spread once costs $0.01, and the two commissions cost $0.005 + $0.005 = $0.01, so the round trip is $0.02 a share.
The plan is a $0.06 target and a $0.04 stop. Before costs that is 1.5 to 1.
After costs, a winner nets $0.06 − $0.02 = $0.04 and a loser costs $0.04 + $0.02 = $0.06. The trade that looked like 1.5 to 1 is now 0.04 / 0.06 = 0.67 to 1 once the round trip is counted.
The break-even hit rate moves with it. Before costs, you break even when winners × $0.06 equals losers × $0.04, which is 40 winners in every 100 trades. After costs it is winners × $0.04 against losers × $0.06, which needs 60 winners in every 100.
Now scale it. At 100 shares a trade and 20 trades a day, the round trips cost 20 × 100 × $0.02 = $40 a day, or $40 × 21 = $840 over a 21-day month, before a single trade is judged on its entry.
Change one number and redo it. With the target raised to $0.10 and the same stop, a winner nets $0.08 and a loser costs $0.06, so break-even needs 6 / (8 + 6) = 43 winners in 100. The wider target helps only if the one-minute chart actually offers moves that size, which is why the busiest hours matter.
The original data
Of the 24,971 unique videos in this site’s search study, 108 have a title about 1-minute scalping, from 65 channels, at a median of 48,330.5 views. The most viewed has 1,564,747, and 56 of the 108 stay under 50,000.
That median is about twice the scalping topic as a whole: 762 titles mention scalping at all, at a median of 23,118 views. The one-minute version draws a larger audience per video than the style it belongs to.
12 of the 108 titles put a dollar figure, a win rate or a percentage in the title itself.
Not one of the 108 titles mentions spread, commission, fees or cost, and only 27 of them carry description text in the study, where those words also do not appear. The audience is large, and the arithmetic in the worked example above is almost absent from how the topic is sold.
Titles were matched with the pattern “1” or “one” followed by “min” or “minute” within 40 characters of “scalp”, duplicates removed, so each video counts once.
When it fails
It fails through costs that grow faster than skill. A trader who is right 55 times in 100 on the plan above is losing money after costs, even though the chart record looks good and more than half the trades went the right way.
Adding trades makes it worse. Every extra trade adds another round trip to a method that is already short of break-even.
The second failure is the small green exit. Closing a trade one cent above the entry feels like a win, but with a $0.02 round trip it is a loss of a cent a share. A month of those looks fine trade by trade and negative in the account.
A third is trading the quiet hours. Bars shrink while the cost stays the same, so the target becomes harder to reach and the cost share rises.
A fourth is widening the stop after a loss. The break-even arithmetic above assumed a $0.04 stop; a wider one changes every number in it.
A fifth is ignoring slippage. A market order in a fast bar can fill a cent or two worse than the price on screen, which adds to the round trip without appearing in the plan.
Related
Scalping covers the wider style and why cost matters more at every faster speed. Bid-ask spread explains the cost paid on every entry. And risk-reward ratio shows how the ratio sets the break-even hit rate before costs are added.
Price the round trip before you look at a single one-minute chart. Write down what a trade costs in cents per share, then check that your target still beats your stop after that cost is added to both. If the plan only works with a high hit rate, the chart was never the problem.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.