Cobertura, Spread Trading, Arbitraje, Trading Direccional, Scalping

Learn five basic financial futures trading strategies: Cobertura (Hedging), Spread Trading, Arbitrage, Directional Trading, and Scalping. Understand their core

Published · Updated · Methodology: Mixed

Part of: Scalping

  • Methodology: Mixed
  • Content type: educational
  • Markets: Financial Futures

Source video

Decoded from: 5 Estrategias Básicas de Trading con Futuros Financieros | Aprende Cobertura, Spread Trading y Más by AvaTrade España — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:00 - Introduction to futures trading strategies

Strategy overview

Scalping is the shortest-horizon way to use a futures contract: positions opened and closed within minutes, aiming at small moves repeated many times. What makes this entry unusual is that it does not arrive alone — it comes from an overview that presents scalping as one of five basic uses of financial futures, alongside cobertura (hedging), spread trading, arbitrage and outright directional trading. Read that way, scalping stops being a technique in competition with the others and becomes one position on a map, marked out by holding period and by the kind of exposure the trader is willing to carry.

That map is worth having before any rule set. Hedging uses a futures position to offset exposure the trader already has elsewhere, so the futures leg is not where the profit is supposed to come from. Spread trading isolates the relationship between two contracts rather than the direction of either. Arbitrage targets pricing discrepancies and lives or dies on execution speed and cost. Directional trading accepts outright exposure to where price goes. Scalping accepts that same outright exposure but compresses the holding period so far that spread, commission and fill quality stop being footnotes and start being the strategy's main opponent — which is why a scalper's contract choice and cost structure matter more than they would to anyone holding for days.

The source is "5 Estrategias Básicas de Trading con Futuros Financieros" from AvaTrade España, a broker's Spanish-language education channel — orientation material aimed at traders deciding *why* to use futures, not a signal video specifying when to enter. The record here reflects that: a single opening chapter marker, no indicators and no timeframes, because a survey of five categories has no single parameter set to extract. Treat this page as the classification layer; the specific rules for any one of the five, scalping included, belong to sources that commit to one of them.

Topics

futures trading strategies · financial futures · trading strategy · hedging strategy · spread trading · arbitrage trading · directional trading · scalping strategy · tradingview strategy · pine script

Frequently asked questions

What are the five basic futures trading strategies named here?

Cobertura (hedging), spread trading, arbitrage, directional trading and scalping. They are categories of use rather than five competing rule sets — each describes a different reason to hold a futures contract.

How is scalping different from directional trading in futures?

Both take outright exposure to price direction. The difference is holding period: scalping compresses it to minutes or less, which means transaction costs, spread and execution quality consume a much larger share of each trade's expected move than they would in a position held for days.

Is hedging (cobertura) really a trading strategy?

It is usually better described as a risk-management use of futures. A hedge offsets exposure the trader already holds elsewhere, so the futures leg is meant to cancel a risk rather than generate profit on its own — which is why it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from scalping.

Where should I look for actual scalping rules instead of an overview?

Overview videos like this one are for choosing a category, not for execution. Strategy Decoder catalogs strategy videos by concept, so once you know scalping is the category you want, you can move to entries built around a single specific setup and test it on historical intraday data before risking capital.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

Strategy Decoder catalogs 2,229 decoded strategies. Each one is extracted with confidence scoring, cross-linked to the indicators it uses, and kept up to date as new videos are processed daily. Load this page with JavaScript enabled to use the interactive tools, or start from the strategy explorer to filter by methodology, market and timeframe.

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