Many beginning traders don’t fully understand the concept of leverage. Basically, if you have a start up capital of $5,000 and if you trade on a 1:50 margin you can effectively control a capital of $250,000. However, a two percent move against you and your capital is completely wiped out. If you are a beginning trader you should not use more than 1:20 margin until you get comfortable and profitable and then and only then you can attempt to use higher margins.
What does 1:20 margin mean? It means that with your $5,000 you will control a capital of $100,000. Let’s say you are trading EUR/USD and by using our entry strategy you have decided to enter the trade on a long side. That means that you are betting that USD will depreciate against Euro.
Let’s say current EUR/USD rate is 1.305. Again, if your trading capital is $5,000 and you are using 1:20 leverage you will effectively be exchanging $100,000 to Euros. If the current rate is 1.305 you will receive 100,000/1.305 = 76,628 Euros.
If the trade goes in your direction margin will work in your favour and 1% decline in USD will mean 20% increase in your start up capital. So if EUR/USD rate moves from 1.305 to 1.318 you will be able to exchange your 76, 628 Euros back to $101,000 for a profit of $1,000. Since your start up capital was $5,000 it is effectively a 20% increase in your account. However, if the trade went against you and USD appreciated 1% vs. Euro your account would be reduced to $4,000. That would not have happened as our strategy has built in hard stops to prevent such outcome.
Example 2
The most frequently asked question of aspiring traders is "How much money can I make?" Unfortunately there's no easy answer, because it depends how much you are willing to risk.
Trading is a function of risk and reward: The more you risk, the more you can make. Here's an easy example: Let's say you start with a $5,000 account and you're willing to risk $1,000. Now you could place a trade to go long at the opening, set a profit goal of $1,000 and a stop loss of $1,000. Let's say you investigated the market behavior in the past couple of months and realized that your chances of achieving your profit goal are 60%.
Unfortunately the trade you just placed is a loser, and you lose the whole $1,000. Since this was the amount you were wiling to risk, you close your account, transfer the remaining $4,000 back in to your checking account and that's it for you.
Now let's assume you wanted to risk only $100 per trade and you adjusted your profit goal to $100, too. Now you can make at least 10 trades, because only if all 10 trades are losers you'll lose the $1,000 you are willing to risk. I don't want to become too mathematical, but statistics says that the probability of having 10 losing trades in a row is less than 1%. Therefore it's highly likely that you will have a couple of winners within the 10 trades. If your trading system shows the same performance as it did in the past (60% winning percentage), you should make $200: 4 losing trades * $100 = -$400 + 6 winning trades * $100 = $600. Make sense?
Compare these two options:
The risk of losing your money in scenario 1 is 40%. But if you won, you would have made $1,000.
In scenario 2 the risk of losing your money after 10 trades is less than 1%, but you have a fair chance of making $200. Therefore you need to define first how much you are willing to risk, since the amount you can make is a function of that risk. Make sense? I'll give you more specific examples later in this chapter.
Keep in mind that there's a difference between the amount you need to trade and the amount you're willing to risk. Your broker is always asking your for a "margin", and you need to fund your account with that margin requirement + your risk. In our previous example you funded your account with $5,000, but you only risked $1,000. More on that later.
Example 3
50:1 Leverage: what does it mean?
With a minimum account of USD 10,000, for example, you can trade up to USD 500,000. The USD 10,000 is posted on margin as a guarantee for the future performance of your position.
