Position Sizing for Funded Accounts

The single highest-leverage habit for surviving an evaluation is deriving position size from your daily loss budget mechanically, rather than from a round-number lot size that feels right.

Formula: (Account equity × daily loss % × risk-per-trade fraction) ÷ (stop-loss distance in pips × pip value) = lot size. On a $10,000 account with a 3% daily limit and a policy of risking 20% of that budget per trade, your per-trade risk is $60. If your stop-loss is 30 pips away on EUR/USD (pip value ≈ $10 per standard lot), that's a position size of 0.2 lots.

A $25,000 account has a $750 daily budget at 3%. Using the same 20%-of-budget-per-trade policy, that's $150 of risk per trade — meaning the same 30-pip stop now supports 0.5 lots, not because the trader is being more aggressive, but because the account itself is larger.

This is why copying someone else's lot size from a forum post is close to meaningless without knowing their account size and stop distance — the only number that transfers between accounts is the risk percentage, never the lot size itself.

Professional risk management rarely uses the full daily budget on a single idea. Reserving headroom for a second or third setup on the same day — or for the possibility that the first trade's stop gets slipped in a fast market — is standard practice, and it's the difference between one bad trade ending your day versus ending your account.