AI scalp trading in crypto: short-term rules with limits

What scalp trading is

Scalping is short-term trading that aims for many small gains rather than a few large ones. A scalper enters on a brief move, such as a quick drop, and exits within minutes or hours on a small rebound, or cuts the trade quickly with a tight stop.

Crypto suits the style because it trades around the clock and has frequent short swings. The hard part is doing it consistently: scalping by hand means watching charts for hours and acting instantly, many times a day. That is the part an agent takes over.

How AI scalping works on TradeCorgi

You describe a short-term rule in plain words. Your Corgi turns it into a strategy card, you confirm it, and the rules engine runs it:

• The agent checks the market once a minute, around the clock, so the style fits minute-scale moves.
• It enters when your condition is met, such as a 1.5% fall within 30 minutes.
• It exits at your small target or your tight stop, whichever comes first, selling at market.
• It pauses for the day if losses reach your daily limit.
• Every trade is logged with the rule that caused it and the fill price.

Fees decide everything

With small targets, costs are not a detail; they are the strategy. A round trip pays a fee to buy and a fee to sell, plus any slippage:

• 1% target, 0.1% fee per side: about 0.8% kept before slippage.
• 0.5% target: about 0.3% kept.
• 0.3% target: about 0.1% kept, wiped out by a little slippage.

That is why every TradeCorgi backtest charges the exchange's fee for your tier and an allowance for slippage on every simulated order. A scalping rule that only works before fees will never look good on screen, which is exactly what you want to know before going live.

The five rules, explained

• Entry: a 1.5% fall within 30 minutes. A sharp, short drop on BTC, more likely to bounce than a slow drift.
• Size: $50, at most 1 open. One trade at a time keeps the exposure small and easy to follow.
• Exit: +1% from the buy. Large enough to clear fees, small enough to be reached often.
• Stop-loss: -1% from the buy. Tight, so a drop that keeps going costs little.
• Daily loss limit: $10. A low cap, because a scalping rule can trade many times in a bad hour.

A worked example with numbers

1. At 14:05 BTC falls 1.6% in 25 minutes. The agent buys $50 at $86,000.
2. By 14:40 BTC is at $86,860, 1% above the buy. The agent sells for about $50.50, a gain of about $0.40 after fees.
3. At 18:20 BTC falls 1.5% again. The agent buys at $85,400.
4. BTC keeps sliding to $84,546, 1% below the buy. The stop sells, a loss of about $0.60 after fees.
5. Later that evening, two more entries both reach the target.

Four trades, three at the target and one at the stop, for a small net gain after fees on the day. With equal targets and stops, fees mean a scalping rule needs clearly more than half its trades to win. This is an illustrative example, not a real result.

When it tends to work

Short-term rebound rules do best in active but range-bound markets, where sharp dips are followed by quick partial recoveries. They do worst in steady declines, where each bounce fails and the tight stop is hit repeatedly, and in very quiet markets, where entries rarely trigger at all.

Scalping versus swing trading

Scalping holds positions for minutes or hours and aims for small, frequent gains. Swing trading, such as the buy the dip strategy, holds for days and aims for larger moves. Scalping trades more often, so fees and slippage weigh more heavily on it, and it needs tighter stops. Swing rules trade less, pay less in fees and give each trade more room. Testing both on the same coin and period, with fees, shows which suits your market.

Reading the decision log

A scalping agent's log is busy, so read it for patterns rather than single trades: how often entries reach the target before the stop, how far fills are from the price the rule saw, and which hours produce most of the losses. If most losing trades come at quiet hours, try limiting the rule to the active hours for your coin.

Variations to test

• Different windows: a 1.5% fall in 15, 30 or 60 minutes.
• ETH instead of BTC, with slightly wider entries and stops.
• A trailing exit of 0.8% instead of a fixed 1% target.
• Active hours, such as only trading during the busiest hours for your coin.
• Alerts only, on Copilot, if you want to place each trade by hand.

Choosing your first scalping rule

Start with one liquid coin, one open position and a low daily loss limit. Run it on paper for at least a week of active markets, and count trades rather than days: twenty trades say far more than two. Only then compare it with a slower version of the same idea.

Make it your own

Describe your entry, target, stop and daily limit in plain words. Compare backtests on the same period with fees included, run the agent on paper on live prices, and go live small once the decision log shows the rules behaving as you meant.