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Sometimes I risk 50 for 100 ticks. Sometimes I risk 100 for 200 ticks. Sometimes 250 for 500 ticks. Sometimes I only risk 25 for 50 ticks. It all depends on the volatility of the period.
For example, recently my stops and targets have been much wider, i.e. 100 for 200. Bearish news and fear of the market being so high has caused NQ to be extremely volatile. So wider stops are wiser in my opinion. I say this because if you have tight stops you'll get chopped out right away.
Right now I'm doing 40-50 ticks of risk and 40-100 ticks on profit target depending on market structure for on where to put my target. Best I got right now...
I like the idea of using volatility, makes sense to me. Are you using ATR? If so, on your main chart? daily?
Hey man, I still struggle at this sometimes, we've all been there!
To answer your question, I don't use ATR. I use a couple charts. I use 1 hour chart, 5m chart, and then a 5-6 range chart for NQ, MNQ, ES, MNQ. With NQ and ES, I generally just try to catch bounces either down or up on a red or green day. For example, if market gaps down overnight maybe 1% or more, I will try to catch a bounce in the first 30 mins of open. My risk for reward ratio is usually 50 ticks for 100 ticks or even 100 ticks for 200 ticks. It depends on how volatile the market is that day. Same thing with if the market gapped up.
Another thing about NQ and ES, I've noticed you can't scalp them as efficiently with tight stops as you can commodities. For example, on CL I can scalp a small move with 10 tick stop loss for 20 or even 30 tick reward a couple times a day, if and only if, I am patient and wait for a nice setup. However, there is a catch. If CL has surprising fundamental news my stops will be higher and reward higher as well trying to catch the momentum and strong move a certain way in reaction to the oil news.
I also trade CL/MCL (Crude Oil and Micro Crude Oil). I am best with that futures instrument, so I am kind of slowly trading only oil. For oil, I use same charts but have a 200 SMA on each chart to gauge direction, market tone--whether bearish/bullish bias, etc.
If you are looking for a scalping strategy with a long track record just watch some of the PATS you tube videos. (Price Action Trading Systems . com) "Mack" has been doing these for years. The time honored concepts he shows are taught by many others as well.
Be aware that this is a more complex system than it appears to be on first glance. It is a double system. As he has said in his videos it is a mediocre scalping system that covers the trading costs of taking every possible trade in combination with a longer term system that will capture larger moves.
Point in case when he does a live trade video he buys 20 contracts (ES) with an automatic sell on 15 of those at 4 ticks and an automatics move of his stop to break even. He then manually trades the remaining 5 contracts.