Many scalpers notice a pattern: the first hour goes well, the second is fine, and somewhere around the two-hour mark, things start to slip. Mistakes creep in, patience drops, and a series of poor trades erases the earlier gains.
Sustained concentration is limited. Research on attention suggests that performance on vigilance tasks declines noticeably after fairly short periods. Scalping is a vigilance task: monitor, wait, react, repeat.
The fix is structural. Break sessions into blocks. Trade for ninety minutes, then stop for twenty. Or choose a session length based on the data from the log, which shows when the decline starts.
Some traders resist this, because the market is open and opportunities keep coming. But missing trades after the wall costs less than the losses of fatigued decisions.
An experiment: for a month, cap sessions at the length where the log shows quality starting to decline. Compare net results with the previous month.
Often the result is nearly identical gross profit with fewer trades, and a much better net.
Where is the wall in your own sessions, and what does a typical collapse look like?
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The two-hour wall
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