> How far price can move before your broker closes the position, what your size is worth per pip, and what a deposit actually buys in room. Working shown. - Canonical: https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/margin-and-stop-out-calculator/ --- Tool # Margin and stop-out calculator A position size is not a feeling, it is a multiplier. Carrying three lots of gold means every dollar the metal moves is three hundred dollars to you — and it also means every dollar of **survival** costs you three hundred dollars to buy. That second sentence is the one almost nobody computes, and it is why funding a losing position so often fails to save it. This works out both, from your own numbers. Closes you at — Price closes you at — Room left — Exposure — Value of one pip at your size — Floating profit or loss — Equity — Margin used / margin level — Round trip: spread + commission — Room after the cost of getting out — One pip of survival costs — That deposit buys — ## The size sets the price of being wrong Two traders can hold the same view, in the same direction, and be wrong by the same amount, and only one of them still has an account. The difference is not timing or conviction. It is that exposure is a multiplier applied to every subsequent move, including the move that closes the position — so the size chosen before the trade decides how much wrongness the account can absorb. The panel makes that concrete in one line: **room left**. It is the distance price can travel against you before the margin level reaches your broker's stop-out and the position is closed for you. It is not a stop-loss and there is no discretion in it — no one picks the price, and a stop-out is not the same event as a stop being hunted. When it happens it is arithmetic that has already been running for as long as the position has been open. ## What a deposit actually buys The deposit row is the one missing from every other margin calculator, and it is the one that matters when a position has already gone wrong. Adding money to an account does not reduce the exposure, so it buys room at exactly the rate the exposure sets: one unit of price costs one exposure. At the defaults on this page — three lots of gold, three hundred ounces — a ten thousand dollar deposit buys about thirty-three dollars of gold movement. Whether that is a lot depends entirely on what the market is doing, and this page does not know that and will not guess. What it can tell you is the exchange rate. A trader who knows a deposit buys thirty-three dollars of room is making a different decision from one who knows only that ten thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money, and the second trader is the one who funds the same position three times. The other lever is not on this panel because it is not a calculation, it is a choice: closing part of the position reduces the exposure itself, which lowers the price of every further unit of room. That changes the multiplier rather than paying it. Which of the two is preferable depends on where price goes next, which is a forecast, and forecasts are the one thing this site does not sell. ## Raw, ECN and standard are not the same arithmetic On a **raw spread** or **ECN** account the broker quotes a thin spread and charges a commission per lot on each side. On a **standard** account there is no commission and the cost is folded into a wider spread. The totals can land close together, so the difference that matters is not the size of the bill but its behaviour: commission is fixed per lot, and a spread widens when the market moves. That distinction bites here specifically. A margin level is closest to its floor during exactly the conditions that widen spreads, so on a standard account the cost of getting out grows at the moment the room to get out is smallest. The panel prices the round trip at the spread you enter, and reports it both in money and as a share of the room you have left — because at small distances it stops being a detail and starts being a meaningful part of what remains. One thing here is not conventional. The raw spread that loads when you pick an instrument is **measured** — the median non-locked tick for that instrument across this firm's own tick corpus, thirty tapes and twelve million ticks. Most calculators in this vocabulary present a spread figure with no stated origin at all. The limits are stated with it rather than buried: it is one retail feed, so it describes a real book and not every broker's; it is a median, so half the observed ticks were wider than it; and the standard-account markup added on top of it is a stated convention rather than a finding, because that number is broker-set and this corpus is a raw feed. Every one of those fields is editable, and your broker's number beats mine. ## Several tickets, one line Most accounts in trouble are not carrying one position, they are carrying a stack of them added at different prices. The panel takes a single entry, so fold the stack first: add the lots together for your size, and for the entry price use the volume-weighted average — multiply each ticket's lots by its entry price, add those products, and divide by your total lots. That average is also the price at which the whole stack is flat, which makes it worth computing even if you never touch this page again. And it moves when you close part of the stack, in a direction that surprises people: closing a ticket priced *below* the average pulls the average up, and closing one priced above pulls it down. On a short position that means closing the worst-losing ticket brings breakeven closer as well as buying room, while closing the smallest loser pushes breakeven further away. Both feel like progress; only one of them is, and which one depends on which side of the average the ticket sits. ## What this does not do The calculator does not know your broker. Contract sizes, pip conventions, stop-out levels and margin rules vary, and the presets are starting points to overwrite rather than facts about your account. Margin here is struck on the opening price and held fixed, which is one common convention; where a broker recalculates margin as price moves, a losing position eats margin faster than this page shows and the real stop-out arrives sooner. It ignores swap, which accrues nightly on an open position and comes out of the same equity that the stop-out is measured against. On a position held for weeks at size, that is not a rounding error, and it is the one cost of waiting this page cannot compute for you — the rate is in your platform, per lot per night, and it differs by direction. And it does not tell you what to do. It computes no probability that price reaches your stop-out level, because that would need a forecast, and a forecast supplied here would be invented rather than measured. It gives you a distance and an exchange rate. What you do about them stays yours. The distance above is how much room you have; how likely your sizing is to spend it is the [risk of ruin calculator](https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/risk-of-ruin-calculator/). Where the constraint is a firm's drawdown floor rather than a broker's margin, that is the [trailing drawdown calculator](https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/trailing-drawdown-calculator/). The cost of crossing the spread is defined at [execution cost](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/execution-cost/), and the widening that arrives exactly when room is shortest at [spread widening](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/spread-widening/); the forced close itself is a [hard breach](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/hard-breach/) when a firm's rule triggers it. If you believe a fill was taken from you rather than by the arithmetic,[the measured version of that question](https://hadalinstruments.com/research/do-brokers-hunt-your-stop-losses/) is worth reading first. The full list is under [calculators](https://hadalinstruments.com/tools/). The live version of the distance above — recomputed on every fill, with correlated positions folded into a single exposure rather than counted separately — is the [Prop-Evaluee Risk Guardian](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/prop-evaluee-risk-guardian/). And the spread and commission you entered are your estimates of your own costs; the [Execution Cost Auditor](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/execution-cost-auditor/) reads them out of your statement instead of asking you. And when the inputs cannot support an answer, the panel above refuses and says why rather than rendering a zero — [why an instrument refuses to answer](https://hadalinstruments.com/docs/insufficient-n/) is that design, written down.