Those two are kept in this browser and are never sent to us.
Fill in the fields above and the numbers appear here.
Leverage is last because it changes nothing above it. It decides how much of the account this position ties up, not what being wrong costs — that was settled on line 1, by the stop and the size it bought.
Why the stop sets the size
The usual order is to decide how much to buy and then look for somewhere to put the stop. That fixes the position and lets the loss float: on the same size, a stop 1% away and a stop 8% away cost eight times as much when they are hit, and neither figure was chosen.
Sizing from the stop fixes the loss instead. You choose what a wrong trade costs — a percentage of the account, the same on every trade — and the distance to the stop decides how many units that buys. A wide stop buys fewer units, a tight stop more, and both lose the same amount if they are hit. That is the whole trick, and it is division.
Leverage is the last line here rather than the first because it changes none of that. It decides how much of the account the position ties up, not what the trade costs when it goes against you. The one thing it can do is end the trade early: if the margin posted is spent before price reaches the stop, the stop never gets to do its job, and the calculator says so when the figures reach that point.
What happens to what you type
Nothing leaves the page. The account size and risk percent are kept in this browser’s local storage so you do not retype them, and they are never sent to us, never put in a cookie, and never attached to an account. Clearing this site’s data removes them.
Members get the same calculator under every call in the member area, filled in with that call’s own entry and stop.
The lesson behind it
Sizing is one part of risk management, and the arithmetic here is the easy part. What a reasonable risk per trade looks like, where a stop belongs, and what a run of losses does to an account are covered in the library.
Free to read, no membership needed.
Education, not advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and every example is one trade rather than a rule.