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 5% daily limit and a policy of risking 20% of that budget per trade, your per-trade risk is $100. If your stop-loss is 30 pips away on EUR/USD (pip value ≈ $10 per standard lot), that's a position size of roughly 0.33 lots.

A $25,000 account has a $1,250 daily budget at 5%. Using the same 20%-of-budget-per-trade policy, that's $250 of risk per trade — meaning the same 30-pip stop now supports roughly 0.83 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.