Below a certain account size, your broker decides your risk

Every EA with a risk setting makes the same quiet promise: set 1% and each trade risks 1% of the balance. On a small account that promise depends on something the EA does not control, the broker's minimum lot.

Why the setting stops working

The lot is computed from your risk and the distance to the stop. When the result is smaller than the smallest position your broker accepts, there is no smaller trade. The EA can take the minimum lot, which risks more than you asked for, or skip the trade. Either way your setting is no longer what decides.

And it happens on the trades you would least want oversized. A wide stop means a small lot, and wide stops come in the most volatile weeks.

A worked example: our own index robot

Index Cadence's listing measures this directly. Below about 2000 USD the minimum lot can no longer size every trade the way the risk setting asks, and it is the widest-stop trades that fall below it. The EA takes them at the minimum lot and says so every time. Measured on a 500 USD account at a 1.0% setting, taking them instead of skipping them gave the same return on 1 779 trades instead of 1 562, a drawdown of 23.0% instead of 15.7%, and a worst single position that risked 3.9% of the balance.

The listing adds the part that matters for anyone buying today. The index has roughly doubled since 2020, so at today's price a 500 USD account is at the minimum lot almost every trade, not one in eight. That row is carried by the early years.

Bitcoin works the same way. The minimum position is 0.01 BTC and cannot be divided, so on a small account the calculated size rounds up to it and the real risk per trade exceeds the setting.

Your two-minute check

1. Find the smallest account the seller measured, not the one in the headline.

2. Look for a sentence about the minimum lot. If there is none, ask what the EA does when the calculated lot is below it: skip the trade, or take the minimum.

3. If it takes the minimum, ask for the worst single position as a share of the balance on a small account. That number, not the setting, is your real risk per trade.

4. Compare the instrument's price today with the start of the test. A market that has doubled doubles the money behind one minimum lot.

Below the floor, read the row that matches your account. The headline row belongs to a bigger one.

Index Cadence on the MQL5 Market: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/190845