Placing orders

[DawnO]

Well Ive made my first trade here today! How confusing it is, instead of just saying how much money i want to place on a trade its done by volumne. How do I work this out please. Say I want to put $500 on something to buy how do i work out want volume i want? I am on a XM Zero account

[William Roeder]

1. In code: Risk depends on your initial stop loss, lot size, and the value of the pair.
   • You place the stop where it needs to be - where the reason for the trade is no longer valid. E.g. trading a support bounce the stop goes below the support.
   • Account Balance * percent/100 = RISK = OrderLots * (|OrderOpenPrice - OrderStopLoss| * DeltaPerLot + CommissionPerLot) (Note OOP-OSL includes the SPREAD, and DeltaPerLot is usually around $10/pip but it takes account of the exchange rates of the pair vs. your account currency.)
   • Do NOT use TickValue by itself - DeltaPerLot and verify that MODE_TICKVALUE is returning a value in your deposit currency, as promised by the documentation, or whether it is returning a value in the instrument's base currency (EUR, in this case).
               MODE_TICKVALUE is not reliable on non-fx instruments with many brokers.
   • You must normalize lots properly and check against min and max.
   • You must also check FreeMargin to avoid stop out
   Most pairs are worth about $10 per PIP. A $5 risk with a (very small) 5 PIP SL is $5/$10/5=0.1 Lots maximum.
2. Use a EA GUI such as the one for MT4: Indicators: 'Money Manager Graphic Tool' indicator by 'takycard' Forum - Page 5