Practice Effective Money Management in Currency Trading

Forex Trading can go really wrong if you did not know this. Money management is at the top agenda of every Forex Trader and you need it to be successful.

First let’s discuss about management. It is an on going process that manages your resources efficiently. For Forex trading, money management is about sizing your trading lots, margin call and risk you can handle with your limited capital.

In order to practice effective money management, you need to know 2 things. First is your capital that is used to trade. Second is the leverage of your account. The trades are mention here default 100k full contract at 1 lot. Mini lots are 0.1 for 10k contract.

Capital: Your Forex Trading fund

Every forex trader will need to have capital as funding to trade forex. Since it is the currency market, your have to fund in money into your trading account and use it as a capital for Forex trading. The default currency is usually United State Dollar. But it you use Great Britain Pound or Europe Euro, the trades will automatically convert to the currency that you buy or sell using the broker exchange rate. Example if you are default using USD in your trading account and you buy EURGBP, your USD will be converted to EUR and use that to buy GBP. (USD * exchange rate of EUR * exchange rate of GBP) to buy 1 lot of EURGBP. This will be the amount that will be used to buy and will show as holding equity in your trading account summary. The margin will be depending on your leverage which is the next section.

Leverage and trading account.

If you have a leverage account of 100:1, buying 1 lot at 100k contract, you will need to have $1k holding capital. This is using USD as a basis. So if you are buying EURGBP, your $1k will multiply by exchange rate of USDEUR and EURGBP. Notice that the exchange rate is usually quoted in EURUSD, so you need to convert is to USDEUR by dividing it over numeration 1. So you may be required to have $1.8k USD to execute this buy 1 lot trade. As you can see, buy currency that is much more higher exchange rate then your default currency you will need more capital. But the profit and loss will also increase due to this. Meaning if your trade win 100 pips from selling of EURGBP, your profit will be $1.8k (higher then $1k profit USD as default). This is a double edge sword. Losses appied. (Am not taking into account swap).

With the above 2 values, you can easily calculate the capital you need. But what is your minimum level or capital that needed to handle losses and drawdown? When we talk about drawdown is referring to the maximum drawdown for unrealized loss that your trading account will not margin call out. Example if your trading is set to stop loss of 100 pips and maximum drawdown is 4 lots, so effectively your capital must be able to take 500 pips of losses before you profit can come back. For a full 100k contract that would be $5k for USD default. As a rule of thumb, taking into account highest exchange rate for USD to other currency, 10% rule applies. This is taking into account that your loss does not go beyond 500pips. If it does, use 0.2 to 0.5 lots trading instead. This will bring down your 10% to 2% or 5% respectively.

This is the portion where many traders did not estimate when running expert advisor. If your combined expert advisor gives 1000 pips maximum drawdown, you have to take into account this -1000 pips into your money management.
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