Free calculators that turn a vague intention into a defined trade. Everything below runs in your browser — no sign-up, no data sent anywhere, no live prices to go stale.
These are planning tools, not price feeds. You supply the numbers from your own broker’s platform — contract size, current rate and leverage vary between brokers and account types, so always confirm the result against your platform before placing a trade.
The most important calculation in trading. Instead of guessing a lot size, you work backwards: decide what a losing trade may cost you, measure where your stop belongs, and let the arithmetic tell you the size.
Why it matters: two traders can take the same trade with the same stop and one survives while the other blows up — the only difference is size. Fixing your risk as a percentage means your losses shrink automatically during a drawdown.
A pip on its own tells you nothing about money. Thirty pips can be three dollars or three hundred depending on your position size and the pair. This converts pips into your account currency so risk is always expressed in something real.
The mechanics: a pip is 0.0001 for most pairs and 0.01 for yen pairs. Multiply that by the number of units you hold and you get the pip value in the quote currency — the second one in the pair. If that is not your account currency, convert it at the current rate.
Worked example. One standard lot of EUR/USD is 100,000 units. 0.0001 × 100,000 = 10 USD per pip. On a USD account that is simply $10. On a EUR account you would convert it at the current EUR/USD rate.
Enter a trade’s three prices and this tells you the reward-to-risk ratio — and, more usefully, the win rate you would need for that ratio to break even over a long run of trades.
Why the breakeven number matters: a strategy winning 40% of the time is highly profitable at 3:1 and steadily loses money at 1:1. Win rate in isolation is close to meaningless; it only means something paired with the ratio.
| Reward : Risk | Breakeven win rate |
|---|---|
| 1 : 1 | 50.0% |
| 1.5 : 1 | 40.0% |
| 2 : 1 | 33.3% |
| 3 : 1 | 25.0% |
Before costs. Spread, commission and swap push every one of these figures higher in practice.
Margin is the deposit your broker holds against an open position. It is not the size of your risk — it is the size of your deposit against a much larger exposure, and confusing the two is how accounts get closed out.
What to notice: the notional value this returns is the real size of your market exposure. A 1% adverse move against that number, not against your margin, is what hits your account.
High leverage lowers the margin required, which makes oversized positions feel affordable. The position still moves at full notional size. Choose size from your risk calculation, never from what your margin allows.
No calculator here — just the columns that make a journal genuinely useful. Most journals record what happened. A useful one records what you were thinking, which is the only part you can actually improve.
| Record | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Date, pair, direction | Basic identification. Lets you group results by pair and session later. |
| Setup / reason for entry | Written before entering, not after. If you cannot express it in one sentence, you do not have a setup — you have an urge. |
| Entry, stop, target | All three defined before the trade opens. A trade without a predefined stop is not a trade, it is a hope. |
| Position size and % risked | Reveals the single most common destructive pattern: quietly increasing size after a win or to recover a loss. |
| Outcome in R, not currency | Express results as multiples of risk. +2R and −1R are comparable across account sizes; dollars are not. |
| Did you follow your plan? Y/N | The most valuable column in the journal. A losing trade that followed the plan is fine. A winning trade that broke it is a warning. |
| Emotional state | Bored, frustrated, rushed, overconfident. Patterns in this column usually explain patterns in the results column. |
| Review note | Written days later, not immediately. Distance produces better analysis than the moment after a close. |
Any single trade is noise. Review 20–30 trades at a time and look for patterns: which setups, which sessions, which pairs, and — most revealing — whether your rule-following column correlates with your results column.
If any of the terms on this page were unfamiliar, the education module covers each of them properly, in order.
These calculators are educational planning aids provided for general information only. Results are estimates based on the values you enter and do not account for spread, commission, swap, slippage, partial fills or your broker’s specific contract specifications. Always verify against your own trading platform before acting. Trading foreign exchange carries a high level of risk and can result in the loss of all invested capital. Nothing here is financial, investment or trading advice. See our full Risk Disclaimer.
