What "Minimum Deposit" in an EA Description Actually Means

Almost every EA listing carries a line that says "minimum deposit". Buyers read it as the balance the product was designed for. It is not. It is the smallest balance at which the EA can still place an order, and planning an account around it is the most common way a correctly working EA ends up looking broken.

The minimum is derived from the lowest risk preset and the broker's smallest lot. The seller loads the most conservative set, finds the balance at which the computed lot still rounds to 0.01 and the margin for that lot still fits, and writes that balance down. Nothing in that procedure involves the backtest. It answers "can the EA open a position here", not "will the EA behave the way the report shows".

Position sizing works in percentages, but the broker only accepts lots in steps of 0.01. On gold, one lot moves about 100 dollars per dollar of price, so 0.01 lot with a 10-dollar stop risks roughly 10 dollars. On a 3,000-dollar account that is 0.3 percent, close to what the preset asked for. On a 300-dollar account the same 0.01 lot is 3.3 percent, ten times the intended risk, and there is no smaller lot to round down to. As a rough rule, below about ten times the published minimum the risk you actually carry is decided by rounding, not by the preset.

Suppose 1 percent risk on a 300-dollar account gives 3 dollars per trade, and the stop implies a lot of 0.003. Depending on how the code rounds, that becomes 0.00, in which case the EA silently stops trading and you write to support asking why nothing opens, or it becomes 0.01, in which case you carry three times the risk the report was built on. After a normal losing streak takes the account to 250, both problems get worse.

An EA that trades several symbols, or holds up to four positions on one symbol, was tested with all of those slots available. At the minimum deposit, margin or the lot floor will refuse the third and fourth entries. You then trade a subset of the strategy, and the subset has a different equity curve, usually a worse one, because the refused positions are the ones added during drawdown.

Take the worst drawdown in the backtest for the preset you intend to use and multiply it by 1.5, because the next drawdown is rarely smaller than the last. Then check the lot floor: at 1 percent risk, the computed lot on your symbol and stop distance should round to at least 0.03, so that rounding changes your risk by a third at most, not by a factor of three. With a 10-dollar stop on gold, 0.03 lot is about 30 dollars of risk, which means a balance near 3,000. The larger of the two figures is your planning number. If it is more than you want to commit, choose a lower risk preset or a different product, not a smaller account.

The marketplace form has a field for it, so we fill it in honestly, as the floor described above. The balance we actually recommend is higher and appears in two places: in the description, in the section on requirements, next to each risk level; and in the set-file names, where the number in the file name is the balance the set was backtested from. A set whose name says 3000, run on a 500-dollar account, is no longer the product in the report.

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