Hi,
Please check post #48 -
"the market is like a river..."
Unfortunately, there is no optimum. You need to evaluate a number of datum and your personal preferences.
Which pair are you trading?
Trending or ranging?
Volatile?
How big is your account?
What is your risk tolerance?
Etc...
I will share my personal preferences and you can extrapolate from there. Forward testing is exactly the right way to get a feel for this!
I set my hedge size to equal the cumulative lot size in 100 pips. I am trading .01 at 5 pip steps, so my hedge size is .2.
I have my max drawdown at $2,500 because I don't want it to trigger until extreme moves are made.
I have my drawdown step at $100. Each time the max drawdown is hit, it moves the step for the next hit $100 farther away. Remember, this is related to order and step size.
I have my drawdown pips set at 30 - it must move at least 30 pips before another hedge is placed.
I have my trailing stop at 30. That seems to give me a pretty good chance of making money on the hedge and not cause too much pain if it turns back immediately and stops out the hedge.
FYI - I base my trade size on whatever will produce about 1%/day. I am earning around 1.4%/day this month in a real full size account. In this way it seems that I have plenty of cash/margin to handle any dramatic moves when I need the margin to execute hedge trades.
Finally, I seem to like the GBPUSD the best for this. Plenty of action, low interest and pip values in nice round numbers... To repeat myself, I like a wide two-directional grid. When I do that, most of my job is to keep the electricity bill paid so the computer doesn't stop...
Have fun testing this,
Bill