Enter your account balance, risk percentage per trade, and stop loss distance. The calculator gives you the exact lot size, your dollar risk, your profit at target, and a prop firm safety check. Works for XAUUSD, all major forex pairs, NQ/ES/YM futures, and crypto.
How to Use This Calculator
Three inputs drive everything. Account balance is your current account size in USD. Risk percentage is the fraction of that balance you're willing to lose if the trade hits your stop. Stop loss distance is how far your stop sits from entry, in pips for forex and gold, points for futures, or dollar move for crypto.
The Take Profit mode gives you two ways to set your target. "% of balance" asks what fraction of your account you want to make on this trade. "R:R ratio" lets you set a reward-to-risk multiple directly. Both update instantly.
The Maths Behind Lot Sizing
The formula: lot size = dollar risk divided by (stop loss distance multiplied by pip value per lot).
Dollar risk is your balance times your risk percentage. On a $10,000 account at 1% that's $100. If your gold stop is 200 pips (where 1 pip = $1 per standard lot), your lot size is $100 divided by 200, which is 0.50 lots. If gold hits your stop you lose exactly $100 regardless of where price goes after.
For EUR/USD the pip value is $10 per standard lot. A 30-pip stop on a $100 risk trade gives $100 divided by (30 times $10), which is 0.33 lots. For futures, replace pips with points and use the per-point contract value shown in the calculator.
Prop Firm Sizing Rules You Cannot Ignore
Most prop firm challenges run two drawdown limits: a daily loss cap (typically 4-5% of account) and a maximum total drawdown (typically 8-10%). Your position sizing needs to respect both at the same time.
At 1% risk per trade you can lose four trades in a row before hitting a 4% daily limit. At 2%, two consecutive losers ends your day. The calculator flags anything above 2% because most traders underestimate how quickly back-to-back losses compound against the daily cap, especially when running multiple instruments or session overlaps.
Some prop firms also flag intraday drawdown spikes, where a single position causes a jump larger than their daily limit even if it closes the same day. Staying at or below 1% per trade keeps you completely clear of these triggers on FTMO, Funded Next, and Topstep.
Gold Pip Values: What 200 Pips Actually Means
Gold (XAU/USD) confuses traders because "pip" means different things across platforms. In this calculator, 1 pip equals a $0.01 price movement in gold. So if gold moves from 2350.00 to 2348.00, that is 200 pips. For 1 standard lot (100 oz), that is 100 oz multiplied by $0.02, which equals $2 profit or loss per pip... wait, let's be precise: 100 oz × $0.01 per pip = $1 per pip per lot. Over 200 pips that's $200 per lot, or $10 per 0.05 lot.
A 200-pip gold stop is a $2 price movement, the kind of stop you'd place just below a tight order block on a 15-minute chart. A wider swing trade stop might sit 500 to 1000 pips away ($5 to $10 price move). The calculator handles both — just enter what your chart shows.
Use TradeJournal's backtest replay to check what your real average stop distance has been over your last 20 gold trades. That number, not a rough guess, is what you should enter here. Your actual data will probably surprise you in one direction or the other.