Sizing a First Trade So a Mistake Is Survivable — Cambodia

Measured contract values for your calculations

Read live from Exness’s MT5 Raw+ feed — the contract size, tick value, lot limits and average daily range behind any margin, pip-value, stop-size or profit calculation:

Tick value is the cash change per minimum price move, per standard lot; the 14-day average daily range helps you size stops and targets. Account stop-out levels (measured): margin call at 60%, stop-out at 0% — confirm the live values in your terminal.

The order these numbers are worked out in

• Decide the stop loss first: the price at which the idea has been shown to be wrong. Everything else is derived from it.
• Decide what being wrong is allowed to cost — a fixed, small share of the balance, the same figure on every trade.
• Only then pick the lot size, so that the distance to the stop multiplied by the pip value comes out at that amount.
• Required margin = (lot size x contract size x price) divided by leverage. Margin is what a position ties up, not what it can lose.
• Higher leverage frees margin and changes nothing about the loss at the stop; confusing those two is the most expensive beginner error there is.
• Pip value on most USD pairs is about $10 per pip for a standard lot and about $0.10 per pip for a 0.01 micro lot — micro is the scale a first live trade belongs on.
• Exness provides a free margin, pip and swap calculator in the Personal Area, and the platform shows the exact margin on the ticket before an order is confirmed.

The mistake this page exists to prevent

The common beginner sequence runs the other way: choose a lot size that feels normal, open the trade, then place a stop wherever it does not look silly. That produces a risk figure nobody decided on, and it changes from trade to trade for no reason.

Reversing the order fixes it permanently. The stop belongs to the chart — it goes where the idea would be proven wrong. The risk figure belongs to the account — a small fixed share, the same every time. The lot size is then simply arithmetic, and it is allowed to come out at an awkward-looking number.

Margin and leverage, separated once

Margin is a deposit held while a position is open. Higher leverage means less of the balance is held, which is why a highly leveraged account can open a position it has no business holding.

Leverage does not change the loss at the stop. That number is set by the distance to the stop and the lot size, and by nothing else. Reading margin as a measure of risk is the single most expensive confusion available to a new trader.

The platform shows the exact margin on the order ticket before the order is confirmed, and Exness provides a free margin, pip and swap calculator in the Personal Area.

What the log does with these numbers

Every practice trade gets an entry: the instrument, the hour, the distance to the stop, the lot size that distance produced, the reason for entry written before the outcome, and what happened. Six fields, thirty seconds.

After four weeks the question that matters is whether the size stayed constant. If it drifted upward after wins and downward after losses, the month measured mood rather than method, and the run has to be repeated before anything is funded.

What to read next on the way in