Scalping on a perpetual means opening and closing many positions within a short window, often minutes, to capture small price moves repeatedly. At that timeframe the cost structure of the trade matters as much as the direction called, since fees and spread have to be cleared before a scalp becomes profitable, and they have to be cleared many times over across a session.
A scalp targets a small price move, often a fraction of a percent, and exits quickly regardless of whether the position is winning or losing by much. The strategy depends on frequency: a large number of small, mostly favorable outcomes. This makes execution quality, and the fixed costs attached to every trade, disproportionately important compared to a position held for days or weeks, where those same fixed costs are a rounding error against the eventual move.
Every position on a perpetual costs a 0.14% round-trip fee, 0.07% to open and 0.07% to close, regardless of how long it's held. For a position held days, that fee is negligible against the expected move. For a scalp targeting a 0.2% or 0.3% price move, the round-trip fee alone can consume a third or more of the target before accounting for spread. Canborsa charges a flat per-side fee with no separate maker or taker tier, so the cost of a scalp is the same whether the order fills as a limit or a market order, which simplifies the cost math but doesn't reduce the fee itself. Funding, which accrues hourly, is largely irrelevant at scalping holding times measured in minutes, it's the round-trip fee and the spread that set the real breakeven.
The bid-ask spread is the gap between the best available buy and sell price, and it's a cost paid on entry and exit independent of the venue's stated fee. On a deep, liquid market the spread is tight and predictable; on a thin market it widens, and can widen further under stress exactly when a scalper is trying to exit. Slippage, the difference between the expected execution price and the actual fill, compounds this on market orders during fast moves. Scalping favors the most liquid markets for this reason, the fixed costs of fee and spread are the same everywhere, but the added cost of slippage scales inversely with liquidity.
A limit order sets a specific price and waits to be filled at that price or better, avoiding slippage but risking a missed entry if the market moves away before filling. A market order fills immediately at the best available price, guaranteeing execution but accepting whatever slippage the current order book produces. At scalping timeframes, the choice between the two is a trade-off between certainty of fill and certainty of price, and which one is more appropriate depends on how time-sensitive the specific setup is.
Scalping's edge, if it exists at all, tends to be thin and highly dependent on execution, which makes it poorly suited to volatile, low-liquidity markets where slippage alone can exceed the profit target of a single trade. It also assumes active, continuous attention, a scalping strategy that isn't being actively monitored isn't really being executed as designed, since a missed exit at the intended small target can turn into an unintended, much larger hold with a funding exposure that was never part of the plan. Traders who can't dedicate continuous attention to a session are generally better served by strategies built around holding periods measured in hours or days, where the round-trip fee is a smaller share of the expected outcome and a missed check-in doesn't change the entire risk profile of the position.
Twenty round trips in a session on a $2,000 notional position each cost $2.80 in fees ($0.07% x 2 x $2,000), totaling $56 in fees alone before a single trade's directional outcome is counted. A scalping strategy has to generate enough edge per trade, net of that fee, to be worth the volume of trades required to express it, which is why the strategy lives or dies on execution quality and market selection more than on the underlying market view.
Scalping means opening and closing many positions within a short window, often minutes, to capture small repeated price moves. It depends on frequency and execution quality, since the round-trip fee has to be cleared on every single trade.
High-frequency trading typically refers to automated strategies executing at speeds and volumes far beyond manual trading, often holding positions for seconds. Manual scalping operates on a similar logic but at a human pace, over minutes.
Market making means continuously quoting both a buy and a sell price to capture the spread between them, profiting from providing liquidity. Scalping is directional, it bets on price moving a certain way, which makes the two related but distinct approaches.
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