Many currency traders find it hard to follow simple risk management rules. Many times, they will turn winning positions into losing ones. They will be surprised to find solid trading strategies result in losses instead of profit.

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Most forex traders lose money. They fail to understand and apply proper risk management rules in their trading. Risk management means knowing how much you are willing to risk and also knowing how much you are looking to gain in a trade.

Risk-reward ratio is very important for you to know and understand. As a trader you should calculate a risk-reward ratio for every trade that you make. In more simple words, you should have an idea of how much you are willing to lose if the trade goes against you. You should also know how much you are expecting to make in a trade. A general rule of thumb that you should apply is that your risk-reward ratio should not be less than 1/2. With a solid risk-reward ratio, you can eliminate a trade that is not worth the risk by not entering it.

There are two ways to place the stop loss order.
1) Initially place the stop loss at a reasonable level.
2) Trail the stop meaning move it forward towards profitability as the trade progresses.

There are two recommended ways of placing the stop loss order. One involves placing the stop loss order 10 pips below the two days low of the currency pair. For example, if the EUR/USD recent low was 1.1300 and the previous day low was 1.1200, then place the stop loss at 1.1190, 10 pips below the two day low if you want to go long.

In case you risk too much, you are going to lose a large percentage of your trading account. Now, you will risk more and try to recover the lost amount and in the end you will lose all your account. There is another form of failure that you should beware of. You were able to grow your account 20% every year. Apparently, you may look like a successful investor. But, if you had a good money management plan with you, you could have made 40% or even more in a year. So what do you say was it your success or failure?

You should know before each trade how much is truly at risk in a single trade? Many traders misunderstand this and don’t know their risk. Suppose you have a $10,000 account and you buy one lot of EUR/USD. Your Forex broker will set aside $1,000 in your account as a margin, so how much of your money is at risk? Many would say only $1000 but they are wrong. You have $9,000 to trade, $1000 was for margin. So your risk is $9,000 and you could lose up to this much before you receive a margin call from your broker.

Each pip on a EUR/USD contract will cost $10. So you need to lose 900 pips (900*10=9000) in order to lose $9,000. Many would say what about the stop loss. You are right! You don’t need to risk your whole account on a single trade and trade without a stop loss. You can use stop losses to protect your position in case the trade goes wrong. You could put a stop loss at 100 pips losing $1000 only. You could put a 50 pips stop loss losing only $500.

Investors who enjoy the greatest amount of success in their trading are those who have clearly established money management rules that govern their trading.

Calculating position size under the different money management systems is a tricky stuff. You just need to understand the concept. Trading software packages often include money management calculators with them. Let’s discuss some of the different systems. There are more but these are some of the most commonly used by traders. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that stock trading may require a different money management style as compared to futures trading or forex trading. So you need to understand the concept behind these different money management styles as a trader.

Fixed Fractional System

Fixed Fractional Money Management System is the most basic and the most widely used among the traders. Under this money management system, you limit your risk to a fixed percentage of your trading account. Usually this fixed percentage is between 2%-10%. For more riskier trading strategy, you don’t risk more than 2% of your trading account on a single trade and for less riskier trading strategy, you may risk as high as 10% of your trading account. As a rule of thumb, don’t risk more than 2% of your trading account on a single trade as long as you don’t develop more trading experience.

Martingale

There are many traders who use this Martingale strategy in their trading system. In theory, as long as you have an infinite amount of money with you, you will always come out ahead. But the problem is most us have only a limited amount of money and we may run out of our money soon before we have a winning trade. A better approach on making a losing trade is to pause and think what went wrong and if you make two losing trades in a row, simply stop trading. Go back to the drawing board and rethink your trading strategy. Practice for sometime on your demo account and again start trading.

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