Position Size Calculator
The Position Size Calculator lets you calculate the size of the position in units and lots to accurately manage your risk. It works with all major currency pairs. All you need to do is fill the form below and press the Calculate button.
Use our Position Size and Risk Calculator to easily calculate the recommended lot size, using live market quotes, account equity, risk percentage and stop loss.
What are Lots
In forex a Lot defines the trade size, or the number of currency units to be bought or sold in a trade. One Standard Lot is 100,000 units of the base currency.
Most brokers allow trading with fractional lot sizes down to .01 or even less. Fractional lot sizes are sometimes referred to as mini lots, micro lots and nano lots. Please refer to the image above to compare the sizes and units.
How to Use the Position Size and Risk Calculator
Currency pair: Traders can select from Major Forex crosses, Minor pairs and also the most popular cryptocurrencies versus the USD (BTC/USD, ETH/USD, LTCUSD, XLM/USD and XRP/USD) or Gold/Silver versus the USD. Let’s choose, for example, the USD/CAD.
Deposit currency: The account base currency is important to assess the ideal lot size, as it takes into consideration the pip value and the market rate of the selected cross. We choose USD as our deposit currency, for this example.
Stop loss (pips): Traders should input the maximum number of pips they are willing to risk, or lose, in a trade, to protect the account equity in case the market goes against their position. For this example we will use 100 pips as our stop loss.
Account balance: Pretty straight forward, traders just need to input their account equity. On our example we will type 2000.
Risk: The crucial field of this Position Size and Risk Calculator! In this field traders can select from a risk percentage or any amount of their account base currency ($2, $20, $40, etc). As a guideline, professional traders do not risk more than 2% of their account equity per trade. This technique will allow for traders to last longer with their trading careers, and eventually, also to recoup from previously losing trades. For our example we will select 2% risk.
Now, we hit the “Calculate” button.
The results: The Position Size and Risk Calculator uses a market price live feed with the current interbank rate (in a 5-digit format) and it will display the selected currency pair price (in our example the USD/CAD price).
In this case, using a stop loss of 100 pips and risking 2% of our account equity, the recommended lot size would be 0.05 lot.
Next, the calculator displays the amount of units that 0.05 lot represent; 5,000 units and finally the portion of the account equity at risk, or the value of the position, in this case 40 USD.
You might also find our Drawdown Calculator useful. It can help you to accurately calculate how your trading account equity can be affected after a series of losing trades.