Does the 1 - 2% rule apply to futures trading at all. If you have a $5000 account 50-100 dollars is 1-2%. You should be setting your stops at a 50-100 dollar loss on a trade, yes or no.
$50-100 dollar stops on futures won't work. On micro futures it may sometimes work, if you are very precise, but I'd say $50 is the absolute lowest you might risk on micro futures with today's volatility. I don't believe in rules like 1% personally, because I prefer precision. So typical losses (based on a 2-3k account) will become more like 5-15%. But profits on the good moves each day can easily be 200-300%, when daytrading full contracts with a $1k margin requirement. I think if you are very focused on risking only 1% on a relatively small account, futures is not the right market for daytrading. Micro futures can work but it just doesn't seem like a good use of the futures market's leverage and potential to trade so conservatively.
So if you are trading MES or MNQ what type of a stop loss would you be using when trading say 2 contracts at a time.
On MNQ I'd look for trades where 20-30 points is an indication that the trade is wrong. On 2 contracts that's a $80-$120 loss. I don't use stops but if I make a mistake, I typically know within 10-20 points and then I exit manually. I am not sure how volatile ES has been relatively, but someone else mentioned in this thread that they use 5 point stops which is probably about the same as what I'm doing with NQ. For example in the pic, this is a short I'd look for on the market open, when it's set up to drop immediately after a break of a significant level. Here I could short on the break of the high with no stop loss and not risk more than about 5 points, but the trade is worth 150-200 points depending on the exit strategy. So on MNQ x2 the risk is about $40 but working for a profit of at least $600. With a regular stop of about $100, you are more than safe, and it's still a great return on that trade. But entering randomly in this kind of a move, you can't expect a $100 stop to save you most of the time. So it really depends on how much you work to make your entries precise. To work less and still catch good moves without getting stopped out in this volatility, I think you will need at least $150-250 on your stops and in micros that is pretty inefficient (in my opinion anyway). I'm sure others use wider stops and are still sometimes profitable with it. It depends on how much work you put in and where.