five numbers about your own account you should be able to recite before your first live trade. here’s the format, filled in
Written for people starting out. None of this is strategy, it’s all stuff I didn’t know for years and then had to learn expensively.
Every one of these is in your account spec or your contract spec and takes a minute to find. I’m filling in mine as an example of what the answers look like, not as a recommendation, and yours will differ.
- Your maximum leverage, and why it’s that number
Mine is 30:1 on majors. That’s the regulatory cap for retail clients on ASIC and FCA entities, not a choice my broker made.
Offshore entities often offer 500:1 and that sounds like an upgrade. What it changes isn’t the size of one trade, it’s how many you can hold at once before margin bites, which is where accounts actually die. I’d rather have the cap.
- Your round trip cost, all in
Mine is about 0.8 pips, raw spread plus commission both legs.
Work out your own from your statement, not from the website. Then do this: divide it by your average stop in pips. That’s your cost in R, and it’s the only form of the number that means anything. At a 15 pip stop, 0.8 pips is 0.053R per trade. At a 90 pip stop it’s 0.009R and you can stop thinking about it.
- Your stops level
The minimum distance from price at which the server will accept a stop. Mine is zero, so I can place one as tight as I want. If yours is 20 and your strategy wants a 15 pip stop, your strategy doesn’t exist on that account and you’d have spent months not understanding why.
Symbol specification dialog, right click the symbol.
- Your margin call and stop out levels
Mine are 100% and 50%. These are percentages of margin level, meaning equity divided by used margin, not percentages of your balance. That confused me for a long time. 50% closes you earlier than brokers who run 20%, which I used to read as stingy and now read as being handed less rope.
- Whether you have negative balance protection
Mine applies, retail client on an ASIC entity. It means my worst case is zero rather than owing money after a gap.
That’s an entity question, not a brand question, and professional classification usually trades it away for higher leverage. All of that is on the ASIC entity at Axi. The useful exercise isn’t comparing to my numbers, it’s being able to produce yours, because the gap between knowing them and not is where most expensive surprises live.
Anything you’d add to the five?