Retail traders can scalp the S&P 500 by exploiting institutional buying patterns. Banks and hedge funds maintain constant long-term buy programs that create steady exit liquidity. A trader who buys early and sells into this institutional demand can capture a statistical edge through opening-range breakout strategies.
In a book that I strongly advise everyone to read called Efficiently Inefficient, this professor, I think, of the University of Copenhagen discusses how institutions find an edge, what the most successful banks and hedge funds in the world actually do. And he discusses the reason why we as retail traders, if we scalp long the S&P 500, we might have a skew in the probability of profits and some edge that we can find, for example, with the opening range breakout, is because there's always going to be investors investing their money in the stock market. So they are our exit liquidity. If you buy here and here, there's people still willing to buy because they have a long-term buy program. So this is just the beginning of a long-term trend. Then if they keep buying, you are selling to them and you took profit.
