I have been trading for a few years now and I must admit when I first started in Forex trading - I thought it would be easier to trade very short term basis. I thought that a forex scalping strategy would be much easier than swing trading. The idea being that it is much easier to predict what will happen in the next few minutes rather than next few hour/days.
As the days dragged on, I started to notice that I was barely breaking even and a few mistakes here and there, and I was on the loosing end of the curve very quickly. No matter how hard I tried, I could not really get over fifty percent win/loss ratio and my wins were not bigger then losses.
The other aspect that proved very challenging - the constant staring at the screen and trying to assimilate and interpret all the information that the forex scalping indicators are giving you. Just the staring at the screen was very exhausting for me. I felt like time had slowed down to a crawl and I was in some kind of black hole.
Now imagine you are in this time warp and you have a few loosing trades in a row, it becomes very easy to get impatient and loose your discipline and start taking trades left and right. This aspect of scalping proved really difficult to overcome on many levels to the point of causing me to loose all faith in any short term scalping.
A lot of new traders are under the impression that it is easier to trade the short time frames and take little bites here and there, but those same naive traders will very soon be confronted with another very different reality.
I am not stating that it is impossible to scalp the forex markets profitably, I am saying it was very difficult for me personally! I am sure there are traders out there that are doing very good with manual forex scalping and my hat is off to them. The only other way I can think of scalping that may work would be with a scalping program that automatically executes the trades without input from the trader. A scalping bot may be a solution that can remove the emotional/psychological element from trading and thus creating a positive edge over the long term.
Image Source: http://deadliestwarrior.wikia.com/wiki/Scalping_Knife