Normally it is not a good idea to risk more than 2% of your account in any 1 trade. That being said you can?t just invest $1,000 into a day trade and expect to do well after commissions.
While I'm not giving any advice, if it were me I would probably use the entire $50,000 account for the trade. After all, when you are dealing with such short term profits and losses you need a lot of money and low brokerage fees in order to get past the affect the brokerage commissions will have. It wouldn't be fun seeing SSO go up 2% and then breaking even due to these commissions.
If I thought the stock would make a big move in the daytime for some reason, I would probably use the entire account and have some sort of stop loss on it. So I might tell my broker if the trade loses 1 or 2% of its value just get me out of it automatically.
That way I already know the maximum I could lose and if the stock did pull back too far throughout the day I would rather get out of it then hope for a miracle to happen in the last few hours before closing.
