Fixed-share fade scalping as emotion control

The overnight hold that forced a rewrite

In 2001 the operator put about $80,000 into one collapsing name near $1, held it overnight, and watched it fall toward worthless the next session. That unbounded overnight concentration was later treated as the event that forced a rewrite of the process.

The later procedure excludes overnight holds and defines the work as buying and selling inside one session. Overnight-abstention is the rule that follows from that episode: gap risk sits outside the procedure.

Four knobs that cannot move after the click

Editorial reading: emotion is not handled as a mood. It is written as a trading-psychology-process, a rule loop that turns greed and fear into testable constraints. The student assignment is one same-session test with four knobs locked before the first click.

Watchlist-lock keeps the same roughly 10 liquid, high-priced, one-penny-spread large-caps on the list for years. Scanning for new tickers each morning is classified as a beginner error.

Fixed-contract-sizing freezes size at 100 shares and forbids discretionary jumps to 1,200 or 5,000 shares, on the grounds that share count itself is what inflates greed and fear. A constant 100-share unit does not scale with conviction, so a 50-cent cushion stays a known dollar bound before entry.

The fade and the abort

Scalping here is a same-session fade of a just-broken quarter-dollar barrier, aiming only for a 15-to-25-cent reversal on one-minute structure. Entry is a two-step fade on the one-minute candle chart: wait for support or resistance to break, wait for the next 25-cent increment to print, then take the opposite side for a 15-to-25-cent reversal. That next increment is the twenty-five-cent-barrier.

A 50-cent adverse cushion on that 100-share unit is the precommitted abort. The fifty-cent-cushion is the maximum adverse excursion allowed before the fade is abandoned. A larger run against the position is treated as a missed next clip, not a reason to wait.

Averaging down, sitting in a loser through the session, or jumping to 1,000 shares is defined as a process break rather than a recovery tactic.

What the clip can bear

Per-trade commissions of $5 to $10 are treated as incompatible with 100-share, 10-to-20-cent clips. The process therefore requires per-share-friction so a 100-share round trip stays near $0.40 at $0.004 a share. Per-share-friction is the cost structure that keeps tiny same-session clips economically testable.

Execution is fully manual: no parked limit or stop is left unattended, hotkeys handle the clicks, and open gain or loss is tracked continuously while the position is on. Concurrent exposure is capped at five names and usually kept to three, because several fast names can reverse together before every 15-cent clip can be exited.