When trading foreign exchange (forex), position size is immensely important. With brokers offering 50:1 leverage, or even more in some countries, taking too big of a position size can wipe out an account in seconds if a big price move occurs. On the flip side, too small of a position size will leave you with smaller returns than what’s realistically possible.

Let’s look at three position sizing methods. Pick one method and stick with it. Possibly, if utilizing a couple of very different strategies, you may find one method works better for one strategy, while another method works better for another trading strategy.  

The full details of each method are outlined below, and each is also briefly discussed in the following video. 

1% or 2% Risk Method

This is the most common position sizing method. 

Pick the percentage of your account you are willing to risk on a trade. If starting out, pick 0.5% or less (0.1%, 0.2%, 0.3%, etc). If you have a good track record and/or a viable trading method, select 1% risk. If you are consistently profitable, then you could possibly go up to 1.5% or 2%.

If you pick 1%, on a $10,000 account you can lose up to $100 per trade. 2% means you’re willing to lose $200 per trade, or $50 at 0.5%.

We will call this account risk. It is the percent of our account we are willing risk/lose per trade, converted to dollars.

For any given trade, we now need to figure out the position size so we attain our account risk. To do this, we need to assess how many pips we are risking on this particular trade. We call this trade risk—the pip difference between our entry and stop loss price (or the price we will get out if the trade doesn’t go our way).

Since volatility is constantly changing in forex, the number of pips we risk may vary from trade to trade, but our account risk doesn’t!

For example, on one trade we may need 30 pips difference between our entry and stop loss (our trade risk), while on another we need a 100, 3, or 25 pip stop loss.

Once we know our account risk and trade risk we can calculate the proper position size.

Account Risk  in $ / (Trade Risk x Pip Value) = Position Size in Lots

Pip value is something you know, calculate, or look up. If you have a USD account and USD is the second currency listed in the pair, then the pip value is always $0.10 for a micro lot, $1 for a mini lot, and $10 for a standard lot. 

If you have an account denominated in another currency, if that currency is listed second in the pair, the pip values will be 0.10, 1, and 10 in your account currency for that pair.

For all other variations, it’s best to find out the pip value using a pip value calculator. I use this one.

Let’s assume you have an $8,000 USD account and you buy the EURUSD at 1.1250. You place a stop loss at 1.1230 and are willing to risk 1% of your account.

Your account risk is $80 (or $8,000 x 0.01).

Your trade risk is 20 pips (1.1250 – 1.1230).

The pip value is $0.10. This is for a micro lot. If you use this in the calculation, the position size it spits out will also be in micro lots. 

$80 / (20 x 0.1) = 40 micro lots (or 4 mini lots)

Note that your leverage here is more than 5:1. You have an $8,000 account but are taking a €40,000 position (position value is based on the first currency listed in the pair, in this case, euros).

Let’s do one more.

Assume you have a $3,500 USD account and you short the USDJPY at 108.25. You place a stop loss at 109  and are willing to risk 1.5% of your account.

Your account risk is $52.50 (or $3,500 x 0.015).

Your trade risk is 75 pips (109 – 108.25).

The pip value (use a calculator) is 0.092 for a micro lot. This will change as the exchange rate changes.

$52.50 / (75 x 0.092) =  7.6 micro lots (round down to 7 micro lots, or up to 8 micro lots if willing to risk slightly more than 1.5% of the account.

This trade utilizes about 2:1 leverage. You have a $3500 account and a 7 micro lot position in the USDJPY is worth $7000 (in USD because USD is listed first in the pair).

This is an excellent position sizing method, and I recommend most people use it. It works for nearly everyone. 

The two methods below are for specific types of traders.

Fixed Dollar Position Sizing

The fixed dollar position sizing method is more for longer-term traders, traders who are going to take a limited number of trades, are typically going to hold their trades for longer periods of time, and have larger stop losses. You can choose to use leverage or not with this method.

Let’s assume you want to hold forex trades for the long-term, yet you don’t want to put all your capital into only one or two trades.

You decide in advance how many trades you want to allocate your capital to. If you have a $100,000 account, you may decide to split it between 5, 6, or 7 trades, for example.

In my opinion, 5 or 6 trades is enough. Once we start taking more than that, some of our trades are likely to be too heavily correlated and thus redundant. 

Assume you have a $100,000 account for currency trading and are willing to split it up between 5 trades. That means you will put the equivalent of $20,000 into each trade.

You will then choose a stop loss for each trade. For example, you may say that you will never let the currency pair go more than 5% offside (loss). Or 3%, or 2%.

5% of $20,000 means you are willing to take a maximum loss of $1,000 on any position. Note that even though, in this case, we are risking 5% on a trade (in the method above we only risked 1%) we are willing to risk more because we are only using a portion of our capital for this trade. Notice that the $1,000 maximum loss is still only 1% of our total account balance of $100,000, in this example.

Adjusting for Trades and Leverage

If each trade has a different risk level, you can apply more or less of the allocated amount to those trades. 

For example, if you only need to risk $500 on one trade, but want to risk $1000 on another (based on the $20,000 position size), you could allocate $40,000 to the $500 risk trade, thus bringing the risk up to $1000 (position size is doubled). Or if you only want to risk $500 per trade (2.5% of $20,000), you cut the $1000 risk position in half (now only $10,000 position), reducing the risk to $500.

In other words, 5 positions is your baseline for the account, but you can adjust this based on the risk of the trades you end up taking. 

Once you have decided how much capital to allocate to each trade, you could then decide if you want to use leverage. In this example, instead of putting $20,000 into 5 positions you could put $40,000 into each. This means you’re using 2:1 leverage. $60,000 into each is 3:1 leverage. Your risk increases accordingly, along with potential gains.

This position sizing strategy controls risk, but also allows longer-term traders to give their trades more room (larger % difference between entry and exit). It also allows them to precisely control their use of leverage.

Tip: If holding trades for the long-term, it is favorable to buy the higher-interest currency in the pair to collect daily interest payments (instead of having to pay interest). 

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Maximum Drawdown Optimized Position Sizing

The maximum-drawdown-optimization sizing method can be used for strategies that are automated, non-subjective, or where the person has a large trade history with a strategy.

The strategy must be proven profitable to use this method. If you have lost money and try to use this position sizing method, you will accelerate your losses.

Maximum drawdown, as it relates to this method, is the biggest number of pips the strategy lost before the account equity recovers. It can also refer to your biggest percentage drawdown (optimizing for this has its own section below).

For example, assume you have been trading a EURUSD strategy for the last two years. You look back at all trades and see that the worst period was a loss of 300 pips. You had other stretches where you lost 100 pips, 165 pips, and 275 pips, but losing 300 pips was the biggest drawdown period. This might have been the result of a rough period where we lost 10 trades in a row losing 30 pips on each, for example.

In other words, given the last two years of data, 300 pips was our maximum drawdown. 

Whatever the maximum drawdown is, increase that amount by 50% or 100%. If I have lots of data—hundreds of trades and the strategy has been tested or traded over at least three years—then I will increase the maximum drawdown by 50% to find out my position size. 

If my maximum drawdown is coming from less data than above, I will typically assume that my drawdown could be double what I have seen so far. The strategy should still be tested or traded on at least one year of data and should cover at least 100 trades at an absolute minimum. If you don’t have that data, use one of the position sizing methods above.

Continuing with the example, we have a strategy with a maximum drawdown of 300 pips. We add 50% (in this case) so we assume the maximum drawdown could be 450 pips. If you have less data on a strategy, double the maximum drawdown: assume 600 pips is possible. 

Now, you can look at your account equity to see what kind of position size you can take on every trade. [Note: this method works best with strategies where the amount of pips being risking is similar on every trade]. 

Factor Account Equity and The Most You Are Willing to Lose on Your Account

Assume you have a $10,000 account, and don’t want to ever see your account drop more than 30%. In other words, during a bad period you don’t mind seeing your equity drop to $7,000, but no more, before it starts to recover. Of course, if your strategy doesn’t have an edge, and you don’t expect that your account will recover, don’t use this method! You should know what you can expect from your strategy in terms of profits and losses.

You can make this maximum drawdown percent whatever you want 10%, 20%, etc. The smaller the drawdown used the smaller the position size and the smaller the return as well. Going larger than a 30% drawdown isn’t recommended.

To calculate your position size, take the maximum you are willing to allow your account to drop by, which is $3,000 in this case (30% of $10,000).

Divide that by your maximum drawdown in pips (450 in this case) multiplied by pip value. In this case, we are dealing with the EURUSD so our micro lot pip value is $0.10, assuming a USD account.

$3,000 / (450 pips x $0.10) = 66 micro lots.

The nice thing is that you don’t have to recalculate this as your account value changes. Assuming your maximum drawdown stays the same (a bigger one doesn’t occur), you can just always use the same leverage! 66 micro lots is $66,000 which is 6.6x our $10,000 account. 

If our account grows to $15,000 we can multiply it by 6.6 to get $99,000. That is the new position size, 99 micro lots. If we calculate it using the formula, it gives us $100,000. The 6.6x leverage method gives us a very good estimate of the proper position size.

Here’s another example. I have a strategy in the GBPJPY which has lost up to 650 pips during a particularly rough period for the strategy. Rounding this up by 50%, I assume that it could actually lose 1,000 pips.

Assume you have a $20,000 account and don’t want to see your account value drop by more than 20% during one of those rough periods.

20% of the account is $4,000. Assume a pip value of $0.092 per micro lot when using a USD account (pip values change over time. Always use the current pip value).

$4,000 / (1000 x $0.092) =  43 micro lots. That’s the position size to use for the strategy with the equity balance.

43 micro lots is £43,000. On a $20,000 account that is well over 2x leverage. That leverage ratio can be used to estimate the position size as the account value changes.

Percentage Max Draw Down Instead of Pips

If you don’t know what your maximum drawdown in pips is, but you know your percentage Max Drawdown, such as 10% (using the fixed % risk position sizing method, for example), then you can still use the max-drawdown position sizing method.

Maybe you risk 1% per trade and you notice that your worst period was when you lost 13% before the account recovered.

Let’s assume you have been trading for quite a while and usually you perform quite well. Increase the 13% by half: 13% x 1.5 = 19.5%.

Assume you would actually be ok with a 25% drawdown in your account, if it meant taking a bit bigger position size and making more when times are good.

Since your max drawdown is currently less than what you are comfortable with, you can increase your position size:
25% / 19.5% = 1.28.
This means you increase your position size by a factor of 1.28. If risking 1% per trade, you could increase your position size to 1.28% per trade and still be within your overall risk limit.

THIS CAN ALSO GO THE OTHER WAY.

Let’s say you experience a drawdown of 35% in your account, but you want your maximum drawdown to be only 25%. You need to decrease your position to 0.71 (which is 25/35) of whatever your current position size is. If you are currently risking 1%, you need to drop that 0.71% per trade.

If we assume that your worst drawdown could actually be bigger, such as 35% x 1.5 = 52.5%, you need to decrease your position size by more. 25/52.5 = 0.48. So really, you should only be risking about half of what you are currently risking if you want to be quite certain you won’t have a drawdown of more than 25%.

Apply the Method to Multiple Positions If They Aren’t Correlated

Assuming you trade uncorrelated pairs or strategies, you can use this max-drawdown method for trading multiple pairs at the same time. 

Only use this method on multiple trades at the same time if the trades and strategies are uncorrelated. If you take four trades using this method, and the trades are correlated, you could wipe out your account (assuming the unlikely scenario that you get maximum drawdowns in all at the same time). 

I do this with up to 5 positions (it’s hard to find more than five pairs/strategies that aren’t correlated)…but you need to always make sure that the pairs/strategies used to create these positions are uncorrelated. You also want to make sure that you aren’t accidentally putting all your eggs in one basket by buying all risk-off currencies, or all risk-on currencies. Even though the pairs may seem uncorrelated at a given time, they may all move in the same direction under certain conditions. If you aren’t sure what risk-on and risk-off are, learn what they are before using this method.

This method is for experienced traders who have a very good idea of how their strategies perform over many trades. They have a long history and hundreds of trades with the given strategy, providing them with a good basis for what the potential drawdown of the strategy is. The method can be used to increase returns while still staying within a desired level of risk/drawdown.

Final Word on Forex Position Sizing

Nearly everyone can use the 1% (0.5%, 2%, etc.) method. It’s a great starting point, and many traders will never need anything else.

Longer-term traders could benefit from fixed dollar position sizing. This allows for the fine-tuning of leverage (or no leverage).

Experienced traders who know their maximum drawdown can really maximize their profitability by using the maximum drawdown optimization method.

My EURUSD Day Trading Course guides you through trading a few common patterns that tend to occur multiple times per day, providing loads of opportunities to capitalize.

By Cory Mitchell, CMT.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article is personal investment advice, or advice to buy or sell anything. Trading is risky and can result in substantial losses, even more than deposited if using leverage.