rowan

Part of it is having an order ready to go, waiting for a relatively sudden change in the price to submit it, because the price often goes back the other way within a few seconds. When nothing happens for a while but there seems to be a trend I'll also put in a limited order, aiming to close it within a minute or so. The first part could probably be automated but the second would be more difficult.

I've tried some other strategies such as setting orders outside of the minimum and maximum prices in the past few hours (ie, to catch a breakout) with limited success, sometimes the price just wanders up and down within those limits for hours so no orders are actually executed... or the order triggers on a spike that corrects a few seconds later, so it doesn't get to the take profit level, rather it's gone from trigger to stop loss within seconds... the order system really needs extra parameters such as "only trigger if the price is above/below X for X seconds"

The good old sit and watch method seems to be the most consistent, but it's also the most time consuming.

I should add that I'm not an expert by any means, this is just my experience.