In all seriousness, there is no optimal for daytrading. It all depends on your system, your targets, your personality, your tolerance, etc. I know people whose strategy targets 8-10 pts and their stop is about 5-6 pts. I know others whose stategy targets 1 pt for quick scalping and their stop is .50 pt. In between that there are many people who target 3-5 pts and place stops anywhere from 1.5-5.0 pts depending on their win/loss ratio. In short, there's no single right answer to your question, but asking the question indicates that you don't have clearly defined strategies.... :eek:
no one has mentioned that you can trade and set your stop loss to be larger than your target...i.e..1.5 target and 2 point stop.....very successfull with a 70 % win loss ratio but definitely a stressful style of trading
I fully agree with Magna on this... the stop loss is not as important as the interaction of the stop loss used with the money management strategy... get that interaction nailed, and you can have ANY size stop loss and win nicely (so long as there are no additional conflicts at the macro level of the trading strategy)... Too many newbies want prescriptive blanket solutions... instead they should be looking for the primary conceptual issues involved in trading, and use those as building blocks to trade in a way that is aligned with their personality... failure to address each of the primary conceptual issues and the intricate relationships amongst and between them will lead to trading failure i.e. the objective is logical intricasy amongst the bigger picture conceptual issues in the devising of a strategy, and the objective is most certainly not fastidious overattention to an incomplete subsection of the requisite conceptual issues which, by implication of being an incomplete assessment, is an approach destined to fail...