Position Size Calculator
Enter your balance, the percentage you are willing to lose on this trade, and your stop loss in pips. The calculator returns the exact lot size that keeps your loss inside the risk budget. Run it before every entry.
How the math works
Risk budget equals your account balance times the percentage you are risking. Position size equals the risk budget divided by the dollar value of one pip times the number of pips between your entry and your stop loss. The result is the lot size at which a stop-out costs exactly your risk budget — no more, no less.
For pairs with USD as the quote currency (EUR/USD, GBP/USD, AUD/USD), one pip per standard lot is $10. For JPY quote pairs, one pip is roughly $6.70 at current rates because JPY is quoted to two decimal places. Metals and crypto follow their own pip definitions — for XAU/USD (gold) one pip equals $1 per ounce per lot.
Formula
Lot size = (Balance × Risk%) ÷ (Stop pips × Pip value per lot)
Why 1-2% per trade is standard
A trader risking 2% per trade can lose 10 trades in a row and still have 81.7% of their balance. A trader risking 10% per trade hits 34.9% after the same losing streak — close to unrecoverable territory. The professional default is 1% per trade, scaling up to 2% on high-conviction setups with confirmed market structure.
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Risk warning: CFDs are complex instruments. Capital at risk. For our full testing methodology see how we rate brokers.