How much do you need to start?
The usual answer is the broker's minimum deposit, which is the wrong answer to a different question. A broker will happily open an account with $50. That tells you nothing about whether $50 can survive the strategy you intend to run.
The right way to answer it is backwards: start from the size of a typical loss, decide what fraction of your account that loss is allowed to be, and the minimum falls out of the arithmetic.
Start from a real losing trade
Across 770 published trades our average stop loss is -15.7 pips. That is the number to plan around — not the best case, and not a round number someone picked for an example.
The standard risk limit is 1% of the account per trade. It is not arbitrary: at 1%, ten consecutive losses cost about a tenth of the account, which is survivable and recoverable. At 5%, the same run costs you nearly half, and recovering from that needs a near-doubling.
The arithmetic
On most major pairs, one standard lot is worth roughly $10 per pip, so a mini lot (0.10) is about $1 per pip and a micro lot (0.01) about $0.10.
A 16-pip stop at one micro lot risks about $1.60. For that to be 1% of your account, the account needs to be around $160 — and a micro lot is the smallest size most brokers offer, so this is the genuine floor. Below it you cannot size correctly at all; you can only over-risk.
That floor is the arithmetic minimum, not a recommendation. At $160, a 16-pip win at one micro lot returns about $1.60. The strategy works, but the amounts are too small to matter against any subscription fee — which is the honest reason to think in terms of a few thousand rather than a few hundred if this is meant to be worth your time.
The overlap problem nobody mentions
Every position-sizing guide tells you to risk 1% per trade. Almost none of them mention what happens when several trades run at once.
We publish up to eight signals concurrently. Eight open positions at 1% each is 8% of the account exposed at the same moment, and correlated pairs can move together, so those are not eight independent bets. A bad hour can cost far more than any single trade suggests.
Two ways to handle it: cap total open risk — decide that no more than, say, 4% is live at once and skip signals beyond it — or size smaller per trade so that a full book is still tolerable. Either is fine. Ignoring it is not.
What to work out before you fund anything
- Your risk per trade in currency, not in pips or lots.
- The lot size that produces it for a given stop distance. Our position-sizing calculator does this on any signal.
- Your maximum total open risk, and what you do when you hit it.
- The size of a losing run you can sit through without changing your plan. Our published record shows what those look like.
Answer those four and the deposit amount answers itself. Skip them and no deposit is large enough, because the problem was never the size of the account.