I Trade Forex explained by professional Forex trading experts the “I Trade Forex” FX trading team.
I Trade Forex?
In looking at the trading records of tens of thousands of clients from a major FX broker, as well as talking with even more traders daily via live webinars, Twitter, and email, it appears that traders enter the Forex market with a desire to cap their potential for losses on their risk based capital. Therefore, many newer traders choose to start trading forex with a small capital base.
What we have found out through the analysis of thousands of trading accounts is that traders with larger account balances tend to be profitable on a higher percentage of trades. We feel this is a result of the EFFECTIVE LEVERAGEused in the trading account.
Since many smaller traders are inexperienced in trading forex, they tend to expose their account to significantly higher levels of effective leverage. As a result, this increase in leverage can magnify losses in their trading account. Emotionally spent, traders then either give up on forex or choose to compound the issue by continuing to trade in relatively high amounts of effective leverage. This becomes a vicious cycle that damages the enthusiasm which attracted the trader to forex.
No matter how good or bad your strategy is, your decision (or non-decision, as the case may be) about effective leverage has direct and powerful effects on the outcomes of your trading. Last year, we published some tests showing the results over time of the same strategy with different leverage. You can read it in the article Forex Trading: Controlling Leverage and Margin.
In figure 2, we have modified 2 elements of the chart in figure 1. First, we renamed each column to represent the highest dollar value that qualified for the given column. For example, the $0-$999 equity range is now being represented as the $999 group. The $1,000 – $4,999 equity range is now being represented as the $4,999 group. And likewise, the $5,000 – $9,999 range is now being represented as the $9,999 group.
The second change made was that we calculated the average trade size of each group and divided it into the maximum possible account balance for that group. In essence, this provided us a conservative and understated effective leverage amount. (A larger balance reduces the effective leverage so the red line on the chart is the lowest and most conservative calculation of the chart.) For example, the average trade size for the $999 group was 26k. If we take the average trade size and divide it by the account equity, the result is the effective leverage used by that group on average.
As the effective leverage dropped significantly from the $999 group to the $4,999 group (red line), the resulting proportion of profitable accounts increased dramatically by 12 basis points (blue bars). Then, as further capital is added to the accounts such that they moved into the $9,999 category, the effective leverage continued to incrementally drop pushing the profitability ratio even higher to 37%.
Game Plan: How much effective leverage should I use?
We recommend trading with effective leverage of 10 to 1 or less. We don’t know when the market conditions will change causing our strategy to take on losses. Therefore, keep the effective leverage at conservative levels while using a stop loss on all trades. Here is a simple calculation to help you determine a target trade size based on your account equity.
Account Equity X Effective Leverage Target = Maximum Trade Size of All Combined Positions
10 : 1 Leverage Calculations
Account Equity
Trade Size
$5,000
50,000
$10,000
100,000
$25,000
250,000
$100,000
1,000,000
$1,000,000
10,000,000
Figure 3
The above illustration shows a trader’s account size and the maximum trade size based on 10 to 1 leverage. That means if you have $10,000 in your account, then never have more than 100,000 of open trades at any one time.
The precise amount of leverage used is decided entirely by each individual trader. You may decide that you are more comfortable using an even lower effective leverage such as 5 to 1 or 3 to 1.
Most professional traders enter into trading opportunities focused on how much capital they stand to lose rather than how much capital they are looking to gain. Nobody knows the future movement of prices so professional traders are confident in their trading approach but conservative in their use of effective leverage.
Adjusting the effective leverage to suit your risk tolerance
Our research indicates that accounts with the smallest capital base (the group labeled $999) have an average trade size of 26k for each trade. Their effective leverage is at least 26 times which is significantly higher than the 10 times leverage discussed earlier. If these traders want to trade at no more than a 10 to 1 effective leverage, they would need to make at least one of the adjustments noted below:
Increase their trading account equity by depositing more funds to an amount that reduces their effective leverage to less than 10 to 1. So our average trader, who is averaging 26k trade sizes, would need at least $2,600 in their account to trade 26k on a 10 to 1 effective leverage.
Decrease their trade size to a level that reduces their effective leverage to less than 10 to 1. Use the figure 3 calculations and chart above.
I Trade Forex Conclusion
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