A scalp can be over in sixty seconds.Every extra tap is a cost.

Executive summary

It became the way most of our traders trade

Scalpers make dozens of options trades a day, each lasting minutes, on screens built for investors. Scalper put the charts, a one-tap entry, live P&L, stop-losses and a one-tap exit on a single screen. It shipped on iOS and Android: 80%+ adoption, 40% of total revenue, and more than half of its users trading with it every day.

01 · The problem

Good enough to trade. Not fast enough to scalp.

Every broker lets you place an options order. Very few let you place twenty in an hour without friction. A scalper lives in trades of one to five minutes, and between spotting a move and acting on it, every screen change, form and confirmation is money left on the table — or a loss that ran too long.

We started from six needs a scalper won’t compromise on:

1. 01

   See the underlying’s chart

2. 02

   See the contract’s chart without hunting for it

3. 03

   Go long or short in one tap

4. 04

   Watch P&L in real time

5. 05

   Add SL / TP quickly — or automatically

6. 06

   Exit instantly

02 · Who it’s for

The scalper

03 · Process

From teardown to a shipped flow

Four phases, each one narrowing what the screen had to do.

1. 01 · Teardown

   I took apart how the leading platforms handle scalping, screen by screen, and sorted every pattern into what to double down on and what to design away (below).

2. 02 · Brief

   With Sameer, I worked through the brief requirement by requirement — margin refresh, strike selection, confirmations, P&L rules — so each one became a state to design against, not an open question.

3. 03 · Flow

   One screen, 27 states: the happy path told as five moments of a trade, and every way it can go wrong — rejected orders, half-finished reversals, nine-digit numbers.

4. 04 · Ship

   The flow went to engineering with its rules and edge states spelled out, and Scalper shipped on iOS and Android.

Teardown findings

04 · Key decisions — the anatomy of a scalp

One trade, five moments

Instead of designing features, I designed the sixty seconds of a single scalp — and asked what the trader needs at each moment, and what must get out of the way.

1. 00:00Read

   Two charts, one glance

   The underlying and the Call chart open together by default, on a 1-minute timeframe that’s remembered for each underlying. Every chart header carries its contract, price and change, plus a switcher to flip between Spot, Call and Put.

   • Drag the handle to shrink one chart and focus on the other
   • Drag it to the floor and it collapses; one tap brings it back
   • Upper chart cycles Spot → Call → Put, lower chart Call → Put → Spot

   
2. 00:04Decide

   Everything you need to commit, under your thumb

   Margin sits under each button and refreshes every five seconds — and instantly whenever lots change. Lots live in a stepper between the two buttons, starting from the default you set per underlying. And each button prints the exact strike it will buy, so nothing about real money is hidden.

   Which strike does each button buy?

   Charts open	Buy Call	Buy Put	Rule
   Spot + 25000 CE	25000 CE	25000 PE	One option chart — both strikes come from it
   25000 CE + 25500 PE	25000 CE	25500 PE	One CE and one PE — each button uses its own chart
   25000 CE + 26000 CE	26000 CE	26000 PE	Both the same type — use the chart changed last
   Spot + Spot	ATM CE	ATM PE	No option chart — load at-the-money strikes

   
3. 00:06Enter

   One tap, then proof

   Buy Call ↑ or Buy Put ↓ places the order at market, or at your price with Limit. A toast confirms it executed or explains why it didn’t, and the position lands in the sheet at once. If you bought a Call and no Call chart is open, the lower chart switches to it — so you’re always watching what you own.

   
4. 00:10Guard

   Guardrails that don’t slow you down

   Each position shows its live P&L and LTP; the sheet header holds the overall intraday P&L for this underlying only. TP/SL is one tap away on every position — or automatic, set once in settings as a percentage or points, with a trailing stop that follows the trade.

   • Active SL and TP appear as tags on the position
   • The sheet expands to show every position, with a fixed maximum height
   • Long P&L figures drop their decimals above ₹9,99,99,999

   
5. 00:55Exit

   Out in one tap — or flipped

   Exit closes one position, Exit all closes everything. Reverse exits and re-enters the opposite side at the same strike, expiry and quantity — strictly in sequence, so step two only fires if step one succeeds. If it can’t, the toast says exactly what happened.

   • “Position reversal executed” / “Position exited, but reverse order rejected”
   • Margin turns red on the confirmation when it’s more than you have
   • Confirmations are on by default; Instant execution turns them off per action

   

05 · Roads not taken

The obvious options, and why we didn’t take them

06 · Designed for the worst minute

A third of the 27 states are about things going wrong

A scalping screen is judged on its bad moments: a rejected order, a typo in a stop-loss, a P&L with nine digits. Each one got a designed state instead of a fallback.

08 · Outcomes & impact

One screen, two-fifths of the revenue

09 · Reflection

What this project taught me

• Design the moment, not the feature.

  Framing the work as sixty seconds of one trade decided what earned a place on the screen and what moved into settings.

• Name the money.

  The strike is printed on the button and the margin sits under it. When real money moves, nothing should be a surprise.

• The edge states are the product.

  Rejected orders, half-finished reversals and nine-digit P&L were designed as carefully as the happy path — because that’s when a trader decides whether to trust the screen.

• A brief is a design tool.

  Working through the requirements one by one with Sameer turned acceptance criteria into states — so engineering never had to guess what should happen when something went wrong.