Tools Built for Automated Traders

How These Tools Work Together

Used on their own, each calculator answers a narrow question. Used in sequence, they answer the one that actually matters before you switch an Expert Advisor on: how much can this account lose before the strategy stops being viable, and does the EA's risk setting respect that?

The order that works is outside-in. Start with the hard constraint. On a prop firm challenge that constraint is written into the rules, so the Prop Firm Challenge Risk Calculator comes first — it converts a daily and overall drawdown limit into a per-trade risk figure you can actually enter into an EA. On your own capital there is no rule, so the constraint is the drawdown you are willing to sit through without switching the EA off, which is a decision only you can make.

Once you have that per-trade risk percentage, the Position Size & Risk Calculator turns it into a lot size for a given stop distance. And once you have a track record to assess, the EA Drawdown & Recovery Calculator tells you what that history really cost and what it would take to climb back out.

What These Numbers Actually Mean

Position size is a consequence, not a setting

Most traders pick a lot size and discover their risk afterwards. The calculation runs the other way round. Risk per trade is the decision; stop distance is set by the strategy; lot size is simply what falls out of the two. An EA that lets you set lots directly, with no risk-based sizing option, is handing you the least useful of the three controls.

Drawdown and recovery are not symmetrical

This is the number most people get wrong. A 20% drawdown needs a 25% gain to get back to level. A 33% drawdown needs 50%. A 50% drawdown needs 100% — the account has to double simply to return to where it started. The gap widens sharply as losses deepen, which is why a drawdown figure tells you far more about an EA's viability than its headline return does.

It also explains why two EAs with identical annual returns are not equivalent. The one that got there through a shallower drawdown had a materially easier job, and is likelier to be repeatable.

Daily and overall limits fail differently

Prop firm challenges impose two ceilings, and they break in different ways. The overall limit is the one traders watch. The daily limit is the one that ends most challenges, because it can be breached by a single cluster of correlated positions opening within minutes of each other — something an EA will happily do while you are asleep.

Where Calculators Mislead You

A calculator is only as honest as the assumptions behind it, and there are four worth knowing about here.

• Pip value is not fixed. It varies by currency pair and by the currency your account is denominated in. The figure is stable for pairs quoted in your account currency and moves for everything else, so a single remembered number will be wrong more often than it is right.
• Backtest drawdown understates live drawdown. Our working expectation is that live drawdown runs roughly 1.5 to 2 times the backtested figure once real spreads, slippage and execution delays are applied. Treat a backtested drawdown as a floor, not a forecast.
• Balance and equity are different measurements. Drawdown measured on closed trades ignores how far open positions travelled against you before recovering. Prop firms generally measure on equity, which is why a challenge can fail on a day that finished flat.
• Nothing here models correlation. Risking 1% on six positions is not the same as risking 6% across six unrelated ones if those positions are all effectively the same bet on the dollar.

Assessing a Copy Trading Signal Provider

If you are following someone else's trades rather than running an EA yourself, the questions change. The maths matters less than the evidence: how the track record is verified, how long it runs, how many trades sit behind it, and whether drawdown is disclosed at all.

Our Signal Provider Scorer runs a provider's published figures through the same ten checks we apply before we will cover one, and explains what each result means.

Frequently Asked Questions

These tools are provided for general information and educational purposes. They are not financial advice and do not take account of your circumstances or objectives. Trading foreign exchange and CFDs carries a high level of risk and may result in the loss of your invested capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results.