The European Union has published new regulations applying to retail Forex, CFD, and the few remaining binary options brokerages in its territory. If you have an account with one such brokerage, the regulations will affect you when they come into force during the late spring and summer. This article will outline how the new regulations will impact your bottom line.
Details of the New ESMA Regulations
In March 2018, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the financial regulator and supervisor of the European Union, announced new regulations concerning the provision of contracts for differences (CFDs) and binary options to retail investors. It is unclear exactly when the regulations will come into force, but some time in May or June 2018 looks to be the most likely date, and Forex and CFD brokerages located within the European Union (including the United Kingdom, for the time being) will be forced to comply. The regulations will need to be renewed by ESMA every three months to remain in force over the long term.
The regulation concerning binary options is very simple: they may not be sold. In simple terms, this is the end of binary options as a product sold from within the European Union.
The regulations concerning CFDs are more complex but still relatively straightforward. Firstly, there is some confusion as to what exactly is a CFD, with many traders thinking that spot Forex is not considered a CFD and will therefore be exempt from the new regulations. They are wrong: spot Forex is technically defined as a CFD. In fact, every asset you see available for trading at Forex / CFD brokers will most likely be subject to the new regulations.
The new regulations will implement the following changes for retail client accounts (more on who is a retail client; later).
-
The maximum leverage which can be offered will be 30 to 1. That will apply to major currency pairs such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, etc.
-
Other currency pairs, major equity indices, and gold will be subject to a maximum leverage of 20 to 1.
-
Individual equities cannot be offered with leverage greater than 5 to 1.
-
Cryptocurrencies are subject to a maximum leverage of 2 to 1.
-
Brokers will be required to provide negative balance protection, meaning it will be impossible to lose more money than you deposit.
-
Brokers will be required to close a clients open positions when the account equity reaches 50% of the required minimum margin by all open positions. This ;margin call; provision can be tricky to understand, so will be explained in more detail later.
-
Bonuses or any other form of trading incentives may not be offered.
-
Brokers will be required to display a standardized risk warning which will include the percentage of their clients who lose money over a defined period.
Understanding the ;Margin Call; Regulation
The best way to understand the 50% margin call provision is to use an example. Imagine a client opens an account with a Forex broker, depositing ;100 in total. The client opens a short trade in EUR/USD, by going short one mini-lot (one tenth of a full lot). One full lot of EUR/USD is worth ;10,000, meaning one mini-lot is worth ;1,000. To find out the minimum margin required to support that trade, we divide the size of the trade (;1,000) by 30, which comes to ;33.33. This is the minimum required margin to maintain the trade. Half of that amount is ;16.67. Now assume the trade goes against the client, with the price of EUR/USD rising above the entry price. As soon as the price rises far enough to produce a floating loss of ;83.33 (;100 - ;16.67), the broker must close the trade out, even if the trade has no stop loss or has not yet reached the stop loss. In theory, this means that a client;s account can never reach zero. Examples involving multiple open trades will be more complex, but will operate according to the same principles.
What Will This Mean for Traders?
The regulations will only apply to ;retail clients;, so you might try to apply to be classed as a professional trader. To get a broker to classify you as anything other than a retail client, you will have to show you have financial qualifications, a large amount of liquid assets, plenty of experience trading, and usually that you also trade frequently. Most traders will be unable to qualify, although it is worth noting that one London-based brokerage, IG Group, has stated that their proportion of clients now classified as recently increased from 5% to 15% of their total customers.
The major impact these regulations will have on traders is simple ndash; the maximum trade size they can possibly make at brokers regulated in the European Union will shrink. Many will say that the maximum leverage limits still offer far more than any trader could need, and I agree. I am wary of leverage and I hate to see anyone using leverage greater than 3 to 1 for Forex under any conditions, or any leverage at all for stocks and cryptocurrencies. Commodities can also fluctuate wildly in value. Too many people forget that the biggest danger in leverage is not overly large position sizing, it is that a ldquo;black swan rdquo; event such as the CHF flash crash of 2015 could happen and wipe out your account through huge price slippage. However, there is another factor that is widely forgotten: why assume that a trader rsquo;s account at one Forex broker is all the money they have in the world? For example, a trader might have $10,000 in the bank. If they deposit $1,000 at a broker offering maximum leverage of 300 to 1, they can trade up to $300,000. At a leverage limit of 30 to 1, that trader will have to deposit their entire $10,000 fund to trade at the same size. In a real sense, that trader might now have to take on more risk to operate in the same way, because if the broker goes bust, while beforehand they might lose $1,000 now they could lose $10,000! Even without negative balance protection, that broker would still have to come after them to try to get an extra $9,000 which they theoretically risk. Yet we saw after the CHF crash that brokers don rsquo;t come after every single client whose losses exceeded their deposit, due to legal costs and reputational issues. This shows that although the stated purpose of the regulation is to protect traders from excessive losses, the story is not as simple as you may think.
Beyond having to deposit more margin, and automatic margin calls, the other major change for traders will be that they will enjoy negative balance protection. This is a positive development which hopefully will make brokerages focus more heavily on the risks they are taking with their business model in the market. At the same time, a possible side effect of the new regulation is the potential increase in average deposits, leading to brokerages being more stable and better capitalized with client funds. Two final notes: brokerages will have to report on their websites the percentages of clients who are losing and making money, although the period over which the statistics must refer to is currently not clear. This will help to shed light on the debate over what percentage of retail traders are profitable, although some brokerages have already released what they claim to be accurate statistics showing that clients with larger account sizes tend to perform better as traders. Additionally, bonuses and promotions will be banned. I welcome this, as not only do they trivialize the serious business of trading, they are almost always a trick offering the illusion of free money whilst preventing traders from withdrawing any profits until a large number of trades are made (read the fine print the next time you squo;).
What If Yoursquo;re Not Happy Remaining in the EU?
Traders with accounts at affected brokers who cannot obtain professional status classification and feel they really need higher leverage than the ESMA limits outlined above might look for a solution by opening accounts with brokers outside the European Union. The most obvious destination would be Australia or New Zealand, where it will still be possible to find reasonably well-regulated Forex brokerages offering leverage in the range of 400 to 1. A recent development that is not talked about much is the growing difficulty of transferring funds to and from Forex brokerages in less tightly regulated jurisdictions. You might decide to open an account with a brokerage in Vanuatu, but you may find that a bank within the European Union might just refuse to send your money there for a deposit. This means that going far offshore, depending upon where you live, may not be a feasible option. In any case, the new regule impossible to live with, and overall there is a compelling case that they are a net benefit to any trader, so why migrate?
How Much Leverage Should I Use? | Trading Forex
In my last article, I explained the concepts of leverage, margin and position sizing in Forex, concluding with the importance of knowing the “true leverage” of your trading account at any time, as it has a direct bearing on your risk of suffering a severe or catastrophic loss.
In this article, I am going to look for some answers to a question that every trader wrestles with – how much leverage to use in trading. The measure I am going to use is “true leverage”, which is a measure of the total maximum loss you are exposed to as a proportion of your account equity.
The Key Impact of Leverage
To have any true leverage at all, i.e. to have a leverage ratio of more than 1:1, means that you can at least in theory lose an amount exceeding your deposit. Unlike the stock market, in Forex, extremely large moves are very rare, and currencies rarely disappear completely, which is why it is generally accepted to be a less risky market. Companies fail and go bankrupt sending their shares to zero, but countries very rarely disappear.However, becoming liable for an amount greater than your deposit in Forex is not just a theoretical issue, even when using relatively low leverage. Consider the example of the Swiss Franc in January 2015, an episode where many brokers shut down their trading platforms, locking traders out of their accounts for about an hour. During this period the Swiss Franc was quoted up by more than 31% by many brokers, meaning anyone with a leveraged position from a trade against the Swiss Franc by a factor of more than 3:1 would have come back online to find their account wiped out! Even worse, if you were leveraged by more than that, your broker could have argued that they could not execute your stop loss until a price which was more than your total deposit could cover, and sue you for the balance. There were highly leveraged traders with deposits of perhaps a few thousand dollars who received letters from their brokers demanding 5 or even 6 figure sums. This is a topic for another time, but it puts the potential danger of leverage into stark relief.
Leverage in Trading and Business
By law, the maximum leverage that can be offered by stockbrokers in the U.S.A. is 2:1 by end of day of purchase.As a general, companies are regarded as over-leveraged if they reach a leverage ratio is excess of 1:1.3. Yes, that is 1.3, not 13!
In the U.S., Forex brokers cannot offer leverage beyond 50:1.
In the rest of the world, it is not uncommon to see Forex brokers offering leverage as high as 400:1.
As always, it should be more instructive to look at a real-life trading scenario in trying to understand the risks and opportunities leverage can offer.
Risk & Leverage
Most Forex traders trade with a stop loss and risk a fixed percentage of their account equity or initial deposit on each trade they take.To be profitable, they must either win more than half of their trades if wins average the same as losers, or proportionately more if the number of winning trades is less than half of all the trades taken.
Let’s look at the most positive scenario statistically: a trader that wins 58.33% of their trades where the average winner cancels out the average loser. Such a trader has a positive expectancy per trade of 8.33%, which is a very impressive achievement if it is achieved with a win rate over 50%.
This means that 41.77% of trades will be losing trades, but that is far from being the end of the story. Over a large timeframe, there will be many runs of consecutive losers that go far beyond 4 or 5 trades. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment:
Pick up two dice, understanding your probability of rolling a total from 8 to 12 has a 41.77% probability. Roll the dice one thousand times and record how many times you roll between 8 and 12. If you count the streaks where you roll those numbers, you are likely to find that your longest streak is about 9 consecutive rolls. It has a meaningful chance of being higher.
Imagine now the same for a trader who is using quite high leverage to risk 2% of their initial deposit per trade, and getting the same (unrealistic) results. If this streak of 9 losing trades is met at the beginning, they will be down 18%. To get back to even, the trader must grow his account by 22%.
Let’s now look at a realistic trading scenario: a trader who wins 40% of their trades, but where the average winner makes double the average loser. This produced a high positive expectancy of 20% profit per trade, but when we look at the probability of losing streaks, the statistics are more alarming than the previous example. A maximum losing streak of 14 trades is the most probable result with a good chance of a streak extending to 20 rolls.
Markets are Not Dice!
The problem with these comparisons is that financial markets do not produce probabilistically “normal” distributions of winning and losing streaks. Markets are statistically more extreme and a trend following strategy targeting profits of 2 to 1 with a win rate of 40% will typically produce larger streaks of losing trades.A good solution to this problem is to conduct a back test over a long period covering all kinds of different market conditions, using hundreds and ideally thousands of samples. Then instead of looking for a streak of losers, look for the worst draw-down, a period where the losers are worse than the winners.
Let’s say you have a worst draw-down of 25 units of risk (a unit being equal to a single losing trade). Double it. You now have a “worst-case scenario” of 50 units of loss.
Now consider the fact that if you lose more than 25% of your trading account, you need a much larger gain just to get back to where you started. As a rough rule, you might decide to aim for never being down by more than 25%. Under a worst-case scenario of a 50-unit drawdown, that would equal roughly a 0.5% risk per trade.
The final question then becomes whether you have enough money to accommodate such a risk. For example, if the widest stop loss you ever use is 75 pips, then to “afford” that you must deposit at least $1,500 with a broker offering trading in micro-lots. If you had 4 trades open simultaneously, that would give you a maximum true leverage of a little less than 3 to 1.
Risk of a One-Off Event
Don’t forget that while we’ve been dealing with managing cumulative risk over a long period in the above paragraphs, the use of a true leverage greater than 3 to 1 has been proven in recent history to be risky enough to wipe out a Forex account in seconds.Source
How Much Leverage Should I Use? | Trading Forex
In my last article, I explained the concepts of leverage, margin and position sizing in Forex, concluding with the importance of knowing the “true leverage” of your trading account at any time, as it has a direct bearing on your risk of suffering a severe or catastrophic loss.
In this article, I am going to look for some answers to a question that every trader wrestles with – how much leverage to use in trading. The measure I am going to use is “true leverage”, which is a measure of the total maximum loss you are exposed to as a proportion of your account equity.
The Key Impact of Leverage
To have any true leverage at all, i.e. to have a leverage ratio of more than 1:1, means that you can at least in theory lose an amount exceeding your deposit. Unlike the stock market, in Forex, extremely large moves are very rare, and currencies rarely disappear completely, which is why it is generally accepted to be a less risky market. Companies fail and go bankrupt sending their shares to zero, but countries very rarely disappear.However, becoming liable for an amount greater than your deposit in Forex is not just a theoretical issue, even when using relatively low leverage. Consider the example of the Swiss Franc in January 2015, an episode where many brokers shut down their trading platforms, locking traders out of their accounts for about an hour. During this period the Swiss Franc was quoted up by more than 31% by many brokers, meaning anyone with a leveraged position from a trade against the Swiss Franc by a factor of more than 3:1 would have come back online to find their account wiped out! Even worse, if you were leveraged by more than that, your broker could have argued that they could not execute your stop loss until a price which was more than your total deposit could cover, and sue you for the balance. There were highly leveraged traders with deposits of perhaps a few thousand dollars who received letters from their brokers demanding 5 or even 6 figure sums. This is a topic for another time, but it puts the potential danger of leverage into stark relief.
Leverage in Trading and Business
By law, the maximum leverage that can be offered by stockbrokers in the U.S.A. is 2:1 by end of day of purchase.As a general, companies are regarded as over-leveraged if they reach a leverage ratio is excess of 1:1.3. Yes, that is 1.3, not 13!
In the U.S., Forex brokers cannot offer leverage beyond 50:1.
In the rest of the world, it is not uncommon to see Forex brokers offering leverage as high as 400:1.
As always, it should be more instructive to look at a real-life trading scenario in trying to understand the risks and opportunities leverage can offer.
Risk & Leverage
Most Forex traders trade with a stop loss and risk a fixed percentage of their account equity or initial deposit on each trade they take.To be profitable, they must either win more than half of their trades if wins average the same as losers, or proportionately more if the number of winning trades is less than half of all the trades taken.
Let’s look at the most positive scenario statistically: a trader that wins 58.33% of their trades where the average winner cancels out the average loser. Such a trader has a positive expectancy per trade of 8.33%, which is a very impressive achievement if it is achieved with a win rate over 50%.
This means that 41.77% of trades will be losing trades, but that is far from being the end of the story. Over a large timeframe, there will be many runs of consecutive losers that go far beyond 4 or 5 trades. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment:
Pick up two dice, understanding your probability of rolling a total from 8 to 12 has a 41.77% probability. Roll the dice one thousand times and record how many times you roll between 8 and 12. If you count the streaks where you roll those numbers, you are likely to find that your longest streak is about 9 consecutive rolls. It has a meaningful chance of being higher.
Imagine now the same for a trader who is using quite high leverage to risk 2% of their initial deposit per trade, and getting the same (unrealistic) results. If this streak of 9 losing trades is met at the beginning, they will be down 18%. To get back to even, the trader must grow his account by 22%.
Let’s now look at a realistic trading scenario: a trader who wins 40% of their trades, but where the average winner makes double the average loser. This produced a high positive expectancy of 20% profit per trade, but when we look at the probability of losing streaks, the statistics are more alarming than the previous example. A maximum losing streak of 14 trades is the most probable result with a good chance of a streak extending to 20 rolls.
Markets are Not Dice!
The problem with these comparisons is that financial markets do not produce probabilistically “normal” distributions of winning and losing streaks. Markets are statistically more extreme and a trend following strategy targeting profits of 2 to 1 with a win rate of 40% will typically produce larger streaks of losing trades.A good solution to this problem is to conduct a back test over a long period covering all kinds of different market conditions, using hundreds and ideally thousands of samples. Then instead of looking for a streak of losers, look for the worst draw-down, a period where the losers are worse than the winners.
Let’s say you have a worst draw-down of 25 units of risk (a unit being equal to a single losing trade). Double it. You now have a “worst-case scenario” of 50 units of loss.
Now consider the fact that if you lose more than 25% of your trading account, you need a much larger gain just to get back to where you started. As a rough rule, you might decide to aim for never being down by more than 25%. Under a worst-case scenario of a 50-unit drawdown, that would equal roughly a 0.5% risk per trade.
The final question then becomes whether you have enough money to accommodate such a risk. For example, if the widest stop loss you ever use is 75 pips, then to “afford” that you must deposit at least $1,500 with a broker offering trading in micro-lots. If you had 4 trades open simultaneously, that would give you a maximum true leverage of a little less than 3 to 1.
Risk of a One-Off Event
Don’t forget that while we’ve been dealing with managing cumulative risk over a long period in the above paragraphs, the use of a true leverage greater than 3 to 1 has been proven in recent history to be risky enough to wipe out a Forex account in seconds.Source
How Much Leverage Should I Use? | Trading Forex
In my last article, I explained the concepts of leverage, margin and position sizing in Forex, concluding with the importance of knowing the “true leverage” of your trading account at any time, as it has a direct bearing on your risk of suffering a severe or catastrophic loss.
In this article, I am going to look for some answers to a question that every trader wrestles with – how much leverage to use in trading. The measure I am going to use is “true leverage”, which is a measure of the total maximum loss you are exposed to as a proportion of your account equity.
The Key Impact of Leverage
To have any true leverage at all, i.e. to have a leverage ratio of more than 1:1, means that you can at least in theory lose an amount exceeding your deposit. Unlike the stock market, in Forex, extremely large moves are very rare, and currencies rarely disappear completely, which is why it is generally accepted to be a less risky market. Companies fail and go bankrupt sending their shares to zero, but countries very rarely disappear.However, becoming liable for an amount greater than your deposit in Forex is not just a theoretical issue, even when using relatively low leverage. Consider the example of the Swiss Franc in January 2015, an episode where many brokers shut down their trading platforms, locking traders out of their accounts for about an hour. During this period the Swiss Franc was quoted up by more than 31% by many brokers, meaning anyone with a leveraged position from a trade against the Swiss Franc by a factor of more than 3:1 would have come back online to find their account wiped out! Even worse, if you were leveraged by more than that, your broker could have argued that they could not execute your stop loss until a price which was more than your total deposit could cover, and sue you for the balance. There were highly leveraged traders with deposits of perhaps a few thousand dollars who received letters from their brokers demanding 5 or even 6 figure sums. This is a topic for another time, but it puts the potential danger of leverage into stark relief.
Leverage in Trading and Business
By law, the maximum leverage that can be offered by stockbrokers in the U.S.A. is 2:1 by end of day of purchase.As a general, companies are regarded as over-leveraged if they reach a leverage ratio is excess of 1:1.3. Yes, that is 1.3, not 13!
In the U.S., Forex brokers cannot offer leverage beyond 50:1.
In the rest of the world, it is not uncommon to see Forex brokers offering leverage as high as 400:1.
As always, it should be more instructive to look at a real-life trading scenario in trying to understand the risks and opportunities leverage can offer.
Risk & Leverage
Most Forex traders trade with a stop loss and risk a fixed percentage of their account equity or initial deposit on each trade they take.To be profitable, they must either win more than half of their trades if wins average the same as losers, or proportionately more if the number of winning trades is less than half of all the trades taken.
Let’s look at the most positive scenario statistically: a trader that wins 58.33% of their trades where the average winner cancels out the average loser. Such a trader has a positive expectancy per trade of 8.33%, which is a very impressive achievement if it is achieved with a win rate over 50%.
This means that 41.77% of trades will be losing trades, but that is far from being the end of the story. Over a large timeframe, there will be many runs of consecutive losers that go far beyond 4 or 5 trades. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment:
Pick up two dice, understanding your probability of rolling a total from 8 to 12 has a 41.77% probability. Roll the dice one thousand times and record how many times you roll between 8 and 12. If you count the streaks where you roll those numbers, you are likely to find that your longest streak is about 9 consecutive rolls. It has a meaningful chance of being higher.
Imagine now the same for a trader who is using quite high leverage to risk 2% of their initial deposit per trade, and getting the same (unrealistic) results. If this streak of 9 losing trades is met at the beginning, they will be down 18%. To get back to even, the trader must grow his account by 22%.
Let’s now look at a realistic trading scenario: a trader who wins 40% of their trades, but where the average winner makes double the average loser. This produced a high positive expectancy of 20% profit per trade, but when we look at the probability of losing streaks, the statistics are more alarming than the previous example. A maximum losing streak of 14 trades is the most probable result with a good chance of a streak extending to 20 rolls.
Markets are Not Dice!
The problem with these comparisons is that financial markets do not produce probabilistically “normal” distributions of winning and losing streaks. Markets are statistically more extreme and a trend following strategy targeting profits of 2 to 1 with a win rate of 40% will typically produce larger streaks of losing trades.A good solution to this problem is to conduct a back test over a long period covering all kinds of different market conditions, using hundreds and ideally thousands of samples. Then instead of looking for a streak of losers, look for the worst draw-down, a period where the losers are worse than the winners.
Let’s say you have a worst draw-down of 25 units of risk (a unit being equal to a single losing trade). Double it. You now have a “worst-case scenario” of 50 units of loss.
Now consider the fact that if you lose more than 25% of your trading account, you need a much larger gain just to get back to where you started. As a rough rule, you might decide to aim for never being down by more than 25%. Under a worst-case scenario of a 50-unit drawdown, that would equal roughly a 0.5% risk per trade.
The final question then becomes whether you have enough money to accommodate such a risk. For example, if the widest stop loss you ever use is 75 pips, then to “afford” that you must deposit at least $1,500 with a broker offering trading in micro-lots. If you had 4 trades open simultaneously, that would give you a maximum true leverage of a little less than 3 to 1.
Risk of a One-Off Event
Don’t forget that while we’ve been dealing with managing cumulative risk over a long period in the above paragraphs, the use of a true leverage greater than 3 to 1 has been proven in recent history to be risky enough to wipe out a Forex account in seconds.Source
How Much Leverage Should I Use? | Trading Forex
In my last article, I explained the concepts of leverage, margin and position sizing in Forex, concluding with the importance of knowing the “true leverage” of your trading account at any time, as it has a direct bearing on your risk of suffering a severe or catastrophic loss.
In this article, I am going to look for some answers to a question that every trader wrestles with – how much leverage to use in trading. The measure I am going to use is “true leverage”, which is a measure of the total maximum loss you are exposed to as a proportion of your account equity.
The Key Impact of Leverage
To have any true leverage at all, i.e. to have a leverage ratio of more than 1:1, means that you can at least in theory lose an amount exceeding your deposit. Unlike the stock market, in Forex, extremely large moves are very rare, and currencies rarely disappear completely, which is why it is generally accepted to be a less risky market. Companies fail and go bankrupt sending their shares to zero, but countries very rarely disappear.However, becoming liable for an amount greater than your deposit in Forex is not just a theoretical issue, even when using relatively low leverage. Consider the example of the Swiss Franc in January 2015, an episode where many brokers shut down their trading platforms, locking traders out of their accounts for about an hour. During this period the Swiss Franc was quoted up by more than 31% by many brokers, meaning anyone with a leveraged position from a trade against the Swiss Franc by a factor of more than 3:1 would have come back online to find their account wiped out! Even worse, if you were leveraged by more than that, your broker could have argued that they could not execute your stop loss until a price which was more than your total deposit could cover, and sue you for the balance. There were highly leveraged traders with deposits of perhaps a few thousand dollars who received letters from their brokers demanding 5 or even 6 figure sums. This is a topic for another time, but it puts the potential danger of leverage into stark relief.
Leverage in Trading and Business
By law, the maximum leverage that can be offered by stockbrokers in the U.S.A. is 2:1 by end of day of purchase.As a general, companies are regarded as over-leveraged if they reach a leverage ratio is excess of 1:1.3. Yes, that is 1.3, not 13!
In the U.S., Forex brokers cannot offer leverage beyond 50:1.
In the rest of the world, it is not uncommon to see Forex brokers offering leverage as high as 400:1.
As always, it should be more instructive to look at a real-life trading scenario in trying to understand the risks and opportunities leverage can offer.
Risk & Leverage
Most Forex traders trade with a stop loss and risk a fixed percentage of their account equity or initial deposit on each trade they take.To be profitable, they must either win more than half of their trades if wins average the same as losers, or proportionately more if the number of winning trades is less than half of all the trades taken.
Let’s look at the most positive scenario statistically: a trader that wins 58.33% of their trades where the average winner cancels out the average loser. Such a trader has a positive expectancy per trade of 8.33%, which is a very impressive achievement if it is achieved with a win rate over 50%.
This means that 41.77% of trades will be losing trades, but that is far from being the end of the story. Over a large timeframe, there will be many runs of consecutive losers that go far beyond 4 or 5 trades. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment:
Pick up two dice, understanding your probability of rolling a total from 8 to 12 has a 41.77% probability. Roll the dice one thousand times and record how many times you roll between 8 and 12. If you count the streaks where you roll those numbers, you are likely to find that your longest streak is about 9 consecutive rolls. It has a meaningful chance of being higher.
Imagine now the same for a trader who is using quite high leverage to risk 2% of their initial deposit per trade, and getting the same (unrealistic) results. If this streak of 9 losing trades is met at the beginning, they will be down 18%. To get back to even, the trader must grow his account by 22%.
Let’s now look at a realistic trading scenario: a trader who wins 40% of their trades, but where the average winner makes double the average loser. This produced a high positive expectancy of 20% profit per trade, but when we look at the probability of losing streaks, the statistics are more alarming than the previous example. A maximum losing streak of 14 trades is the most probable result with a good chance of a streak extending to 20 rolls.
Markets are Not Dice!
The problem with these comparisons is that financial markets do not produce probabilistically “normal” distributions of winning and losing streaks. Markets are statistically more extreme and a trend following strategy targeting profits of 2 to 1 with a win rate of 40% will typically produce larger streaks of losing trades.A good solution to this problem is to conduct a back test over a long period covering all kinds of different market conditions, using hundreds and ideally thousands of samples. Then instead of looking for a streak of losers, look for the worst draw-down, a period where the losers are worse than the winners.
Let’s say you have a worst draw-down of 25 units of risk (a unit being equal to a single losing trade). Double it. You now have a “worst-case scenario” of 50 units of loss.
Now consider the fact that if you lose more than 25% of your trading account, you need a much larger gain just to get back to where you started. As a rough rule, you might decide to aim for never being down by more than 25%. Under a worst-case scenario of a 50-unit drawdown, that would equal roughly a 0.5% risk per trade.
The final question then becomes whether you have enough money to accommodate such a risk. For example, if the widest stop loss you ever use is 75 pips, then to “afford” that you must deposit at least $1,500 with a broker offering trading in micro-lots. If you had 4 trades open simultaneously, that would give you a maximum true leverage of a little less than 3 to 1.
Risk of a One-Off Event
Don’t forget that while we’ve been dealing with managing cumulative risk over a long period in the above paragraphs, the use of a true leverage greater than 3 to 1 has been proven in recent history to be risky enough to wipe out a Forex account in seconds.Source
How Much Leverage Should I Use? | Trading Forex
In my last article, I explained the concepts of leverage, margin and position sizing in Forex, concluding with the importance of knowing the “true leverage” of your trading account at any time, as it has a direct bearing on your risk of suffering a severe or catastrophic loss.
In this article, I am going to look for some answers to a question that every trader wrestles with – how much leverage to use in trading. The measure I am going to use is “true leverage”, which is a measure of the total maximum loss you are exposed to as a proportion of your account equity.
The Key Impact of Leverage
To have any true leverage at all, i.e. to have a leverage ratio of more than 1:1, means that you can at least in theory lose an amount exceeding your deposit. Unlike the stock market, in Forex, extremely large moves are very rare, and currencies rarely disappear completely, which is why it is generally accepted to be a less risky market. Companies fail and go bankrupt sending their shares to zero, but countries very rarely disappear.However, becoming liable for an amount greater than your deposit in Forex is not just a theoretical issue, even when using relatively low leverage. Consider the example of the Swiss Franc in January 2015, an episode where many brokers shut down their trading platforms, locking traders out of their accounts for about an hour. During this period the Swiss Franc was quoted up by more than 31% by many brokers, meaning anyone with a leveraged position from a trade against the Swiss Franc by a factor of more than 3:1 would have come back online to find their account wiped out! Even worse, if you were leveraged by more than that, your broker could have argued that they could not execute your stop loss until a price which was more than your total deposit could cover, and sue you for the balance. There were highly leveraged traders with deposits of perhaps a few thousand dollars who received letters from their brokers demanding 5 or even 6 figure sums. This is a topic for another time, but it puts the potential danger of leverage into stark relief.
Leverage in Trading and Business
By law, the maximum leverage that can be offered by stockbrokers in the U.S.A. is 2:1 by end of day of purchase.As a general, companies are regarded as over-leveraged if they reach a leverage ratio is excess of 1:1.3. Yes, that is 1.3, not 13!
In the U.S., Forex brokers cannot offer leverage beyond 50:1.
In the rest of the world, it is not uncommon to see Forex brokers offering leverage as high as 400:1.
As always, it should be more instructive to look at a real-life trading scenario in trying to understand the risks and opportunities leverage can offer.
Risk & Leverage
Most Forex traders trade with a stop loss and risk a fixed percentage of their account equity or initial deposit on each trade they take.To be profitable, they must either win more than half of their trades if wins average the same as losers, or proportionately more if the number of winning trades is less than half of all the trades taken.
Let’s look at the most positive scenario statistically: a trader that wins 58.33% of their trades where the average winner cancels out the average loser. Such a trader has a positive expectancy per trade of 8.33%, which is a very impressive achievement if it is achieved with a win rate over 50%.
This means that 41.77% of trades will be losing trades, but that is far from being the end of the story. Over a large timeframe, there will be many runs of consecutive losers that go far beyond 4 or 5 trades. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment:
Pick up two dice, understanding your probability of rolling a total from 8 to 12 has a 41.77% probability. Roll the dice one thousand times and record how many times you roll between 8 and 12. If you count the streaks where you roll those numbers, you are likely to find that your longest streak is about 9 consecutive rolls. It has a meaningful chance of being higher.
Imagine now the same for a trader who is using quite high leverage to risk 2% of their initial deposit per trade, and getting the same (unrealistic) results. If this streak of 9 losing trades is met at the beginning, they will be down 18%. To get back to even, the trader must grow his account by 22%.
Let’s now look at a realistic trading scenario: a trader who wins 40% of their trades, but where the average winner makes double the average loser. This produced a high positive expectancy of 20% profit per trade, but when we look at the probability of losing streaks, the statistics are more alarming than the previous example. A maximum losing streak of 14 trades is the most probable result with a good chance of a streak extending to 20 rolls.
Markets are Not Dice!
The problem with these comparisons is that financial markets do not produce probabilistically “normal” distributions of winning and losing streaks. Markets are statistically more extreme and a trend following strategy targeting profits of 2 to 1 with a win rate of 40% will typically produce larger streaks of losing trades.A good solution to this problem is to conduct a back test over a long period covering all kinds of different market conditions, using hundreds and ideally thousands of samples. Then instead of looking for a streak of losers, look for the worst draw-down, a period where the losers are worse than the winners.
Let’s say you have a worst draw-down of 25 units of risk (a unit being equal to a single losing trade). Double it. You now have a “worst-case scenario” of 50 units of loss.
Now consider the fact that if you lose more than 25% of your trading account, you need a much larger gain just to get back to where you started. As a rough rule, you might decide to aim for never being down by more than 25%. Under a worst-case scenario of a 50-unit drawdown, that would equal roughly a 0.5% risk per trade.
The final question then becomes whether you have enough money to accommodate such a risk. For example, if the widest stop loss you ever use is 75 pips, then to “afford” that you must deposit at least $1,500 with a broker offering trading in micro-lots. If you had 4 trades open simultaneously, that would give you a maximum true leverage of a little less than 3 to 1.
Risk of a One-Off Event
Don’t forget that while we’ve been dealing with managing cumulative risk over a long period in the above paragraphs, the use of a true leverage greater than 3 to 1 has been proven in recent history to be risky enough to wipe out a Forex account in seconds.Source
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