Guide 7.3
Beginner, 3 min read. Checked with Scalpel 1.12.8 on .
In short
Scalpel only buys stocks and sells what it bought: it never opens a short position. Every sell, whether a scale-out, a full exit, a stop, a take-profit or a flatten, is capped to the shares you hold, so a double press or a stop firing during your own exit can never leave you short. This is a deliberate design choice: Scalpel is built for long-only scalping of US stocks, and it does not trade shorts, futures, options or crypto.
Scalpel is specialised software. It is built for one style of trading: buying momentum in US small-cap stocks, first of all in the pre-market (04:00 to 09:30 ET), and selling into strength. It works in regular hours too, but every part of it, from the Level 2 montage to the app-held stops, is shaped around that one job.
So there are things it does not do, and almost certainly never will:
Leaving those out keeps the cockpit simple and the safety rules strict. Every exit key means "sell some or all of what I hold", never "sell, whatever I hold".
Accidentally going short is one of the most dangerous mistakes a fast trader can make. A short position has no ceiling on its loss, and the stocks momentum traders trade, small caps on news, are exactly the ones that squeeze hardest. The usual cause is not a decision to short: it is a stacked exit, a double-tapped key, or a stop and a manual sell going out together. Scalpel makes that impossible by design.
It does not make trading safe. Long positions in fast small caps can and do fall hard, and most people who trade this way lose money. Your protection on the long side is your size, your stop and your daily loss limit (guide 4.2, guide 5.1, guide 7.1).