Some optimal choices for a parameter of the Dai–Liao conjugate gradient method are proposed by conducting matrix analyses of the method. More precisely, first the $\ell _{1}$ and $\ell _{\infty }$ norm condition numbers of the search direction matrix are minimized, yielding two adaptive choices for the Dai–Liao parameter. Then we show that a recent formula for computing this parameter which guarantees the descent property can be considered as a minimizer of the spectral condition number as well as the well-known measure function for a symmetrized version of the search direction matrix. Brief convergence analyses are also carried out. Finally, some numerical experiments on a set of test problems related to constrained and unconstrained testing environment, are conducted using a well-known performance profile.