Balance, risk, stop distance. Out comes the lot size, in your account currency, for forex, gold, indices, crypto or shares — and it knows what a cent account is.

What it is doing

There is one sum here, and it is the same for a currency pair, an ounce of gold and a share:

money at risk  = balance × risk %
loss per lot   = |entry − stop| × contract size     (in the quote currency)
lot size       = money at risk ÷ loss per lot       (converted to your currency)

Pips are not in there. A pip is a way of saying a distance out loud, so the field above converts "20 pips" into a price and the arithmetic never sees it again. That is also why shares work without a special case: a share is the instrument whose contract size is 1, and the answer comes out in shares instead of lots.

Cent accounts

A cent account is an ordinary account with the money and the contract size both divided by a hundred. Your balance reads 10,000 because it is counted in cents — a hundred dollars — and one lot buys 1,000 units of the base currency rather than 100,000.

The interesting part: for the same percentage risk, the lot size is the same. Both sides of the division scaled by the same hundred, so it cancels. A hundred-dollar cent account risking 1% with a 20 pip stop on EURUSD gets the same 0.50 as a ten-thousand-dollar standard account, and each of those lots is worth a hundredth of the other.

So why the switch? Because of what happens without it. Type 10,000 into a calculator that assumes dollars and it sizes a position for a ten-thousand-dollar account. The number it gives back looks entirely sensible, and it is a hundred times too big. That is the mistake this switch exists to stop, and it is the reason cent accounts get their own control here instead of a footnote.

Why two brokers give two different answers

Contract size is a broker's choice, not a fact about the market. US30 is one dollar a point in some places and ten in others. Gold is usually 100 ounces a lot, but not always. Crypto CFDs vary more than anything else.

The defaults here are the common ones, and they are editable for exactly that reason. If the pip value this page shows does not match the one your terminal shows, the terminal is right: open Market Watch, right-click the symbol, Specification, and copy the contract size across.

What it will not do

It does not know your broker's minimum lot or lot step, so it gives you the raw number and leaves the rounding to you. Round down. Rounding up is a small, invisible way of taking more risk than the one you just typed in.

It does not account for commission, swap or the spread, all of which make the real loss slightly larger than the stop distance suggests. And it says nothing about whether the trade is a good idea, or what percentage you should be risking. The 1-2% convention is a convention, not a rule anyone can prove for you.

Exchange rates come from a daily feed, not a live one. For sizing a position that difference lands well past the decimal your broker rounds away.

Questions

Which price do I put in "entry"? The one you expect to get filled at. If you are working from a pending order, that order's price.

My pair is not in the list. Pick the closest one and correct the contract size and pip size under "Contract size and pip size". Those two fields are the whole instrument as far as the arithmetic is concerned.

Can I keep a setup? The page remembers your last one in this browser, and the address bar carries it: add ?symbol=XAUUSD&balance=5000&risk=1 to the URL and the calculator opens with that filled in.

Sizing the trade is the part after the stop is decided. If you want the stop and the target drawn on the chart for you, that is what the indicators here do — several of them mark the entry, the stop and the exit on the bar they happen.

This is a calculator, not advice. It makes no claim about what any trade will do.