Frequently Asked Questions

No. It performs arithmetic on numbers you provide — it does not recommend a trade, a direction, an entry price, or an instrument. StopSize provides educational information only, and nothing on this site should be treated as financial, investment, or trading advice.

No. The calculated risk assumes your stop loss fills exactly at the stop price. In real markets, gaps, slippage, trading halts, and thin liquidity can all cause a worse fill, so your actual loss can exceed the figure shown. Spread, commissions, and financing costs are also not included in the calculation.

The most common reasons are rounding (StopSize rounds down to a whole share, contract, or lot, since your broker cannot fill a fraction of one), a different risk percentage than you intended, or a stop distance that does not match what you entered. Double-check the entry and stop prices first — a small difference there compounds through the whole calculation.

The main Risk Calculator is built around share-style instruments. For forex position sizing, the dictionary’s pip value tool converts a pip-based stop into dollar risk. For leveraged instruments, the leverage tool shows the relationship between capital, leverage, and liquidation distance. Options carry additional mechanics — premium, time decay, and volatility — that a share-based position size formula does not capture.

There is no universally correct number, and StopSize does not recommend one for your specific situation — that would be personalized advice, which this site does not provide. Common risk management frameworks use figures between 0.5% and 2% per trade. The right number for you depends on your risk tolerance, strategy, and how many trades you typically hold at once.

Yes, entirely. There is no paywall, no sign-up, and no limit on how many terms you can look up. The calculator and every embedded mini-tool inside a term page work the same way.

The dictionary currently covers 135 terms across eleven categories — basics, orders, risk management, technical analysis, indicators, market structure, stocks, options, forex, crypto, and trading psychology.

Because a definition alone rarely makes a concept click the way changing the numbers does. Fourteen of the most calculation-heavy terms — position size, drawdown, leverage, and others — carry a live, working mini-tool directly in the explanation, so you can see the relationship the definition describes rather than just read about it.

Yes — that kind of feedback is genuinely useful. Send the term through the contact page and it will be considered for a future addition.

No. The calculator, the dictionary, the guides, and the knowledge check all work immediately, with no sign-up required for any of it.

Saved scenarios, recently viewed terms, and knowledge check answers are stored only in your browser, using session storage. Nothing is uploaded to a server. Closing the browser tab clears them, and there is a manual “Clear all” control next to each saved list if you want to clear them sooner.

StopSize does not set its own tracking cookies. If advertising is active, Google AdSense may set cookies subject to its own policies, and you are asked for consent before any non-essential cookie is set.

If only one, it would be risk per trade — the fixed percentage of your account you are willing to lose on any single position. Nearly every other risk concept, from position sizing to drawdown recovery, is built on top of that one decision being made in advance and applied consistently.

Because position size is the variable that determines whether a losing streak is survivable or account-ending — and every strategy has losing streaks. Two traders taking identical entries can end up in completely different places purely because of how much they risked on each one.

Not on its own. A 90% win rate with tiny winners and one occasional large loser can still lose money overall. Win rate only becomes meaningful next to the size of the average win and average loss — together, those produce expectancy, which is what actually determines profitability.