Risk the right amount. Every time.
Account, risk %, stop distance — your exact size in shares, lots, contracts or coins. Free, forever, no signup.
Three inputs, one answer. The tool below does it for four asset classes and remembers your settings.
Your exact size, in the units your broker wants
Stocks, forex, futures and crypto — each with the right contract maths. Settings persist locally; results share as a link.
Presets fill the balance and a conservative risk-per-trade. The drawdown limits are each firm's published evaluation rules — check your own account terms before sizing against them.
- Risking
- $250.00
- Stop distance
- 4.50 (3.46%)
- Position value
- $7,222
Size is whole shares — fractional-share brokers can take the exact figure.
Size answers how much. It can't answer whether you should.
Grade the setup this size is for — structure, levels and a scored read, free and without an account.
Free and unlimited. No account, no usage cap, no email wall — this tool is not the product, it's the part of the product that should never have been paywalled anywhere.
Position sizing in three numbers
Every sizing question reduces to these. Once they're in the right order, the arithmetic is trivial — and the discipline isn't.
The risk budget
Balance × risk %. On $25,000 at 1%, that is $250 — the most this trade may cost you. Fix this number before you look at the chart, because deciding it afterwards is how a 1% trader becomes a 4% trader on the setup they really like.
The stop distance
Entry minus stop. The stop belongs where the idea is wrong — under the structure that has to hold — not at a round number that makes the size look comfortable. Entry 130.00 with a stop at 125.50 gives $4.50 of risk per share.
Size is the output
$250 ÷ $3.55 = 70 shares. Notice the direction: size falls out of the stop. Traders who pick a size first and then place a stop to fit it have inverted the formula, and their loss is whatever the market decides.
The 1% rule, stated honestly
Risking 1% doesn't mean you lose 1% of the account when you're wrong — it means you lose 1% if the stop fills where you put it. Gaps, slippage and thin books don't honour that. The figure is a budget, not a guarantee, and the difference is the reason position sizing and risk management aren't the same subject.
Three traders, three constraints
Same arithmetic, different binding limit.
Tight stops make size big — that is the trap
A 0.3% stop on a liquid name produces a position several times the account. The dollar risk is still correct, but the exposure needs margin and the slippage on exit is real. Size the trade, then sanity-check the notional.
The calculator flags positions worth more than the balance rather than hiding them.
Your limit is the daily drawdown, not the trade
At 0.5% per trade against a 5% daily loss limit, you have ten losses of headroom before the account is gone. That is the number that matters in an evaluation, and it is the number the presets are built around.
FTMO, Topstep and Apex presets fill balance and a conservative risk-per-trade.
Wide stops need small size and patience
A 6% stop on a multi-week hold puts size in the low dozens of shares. That feels like nothing — which is exactly why swing traders oversize. The position is small because the stop is honest about where the thesis breaks.
Stop distance is shown as both an absolute and a percentage, so the trade-off is visible.
What a calculator can't do for you
This tool does arithmetic perfectly and judgement not at all. Those are different jobs, and conflating them is how traders with correct position sizes still lose money.
It assumes your stop will fill
Overnight gaps, halts, weekend crypto moves and thin books all fill stops worse than requested — sometimes far worse. The dollar figure here is the intended loss, not a floor.
It doesn't know your other positions
Five correlated longs at 1% each is not five separate 1% risks; it is closer to one 5% risk wearing a disguise. Portfolio-level exposure is a separate calculation this page does not attempt.
It has no opinion on the setup
The calculator will size a terrible trade with total precision. Whether the entry deserves the risk is the question the grading engine answers, and it is a genuinely different question.
Futures multipliers vary
The futures tab assumes $50 per point, which is ES. MES is $5, NQ is $20, MNQ is $2. Using the wrong multiplier will size you 10× off, so check the contract before you trade the number.
None of that makes the arithmetic less useful — it makes it a starting point rather than a decision. If a tool tells you it has removed risk from trading, that tool is selling you something.
Questions traders actually ask
Multiply your account balance by the percentage you are willing to risk to get a dollar figure. Divide that by the distance between your entry and your stop. The result is your size in shares, lots, contracts or coins. Size is derived from the stop — never the other way round.
Most consistently profitable retail traders risk 0.5–2% per trade. Under 1% is conservative and survives long losing streaks; above 2% means a run of five losses costs more than 10% of the account, which is where recovery maths turns against you.
A standard forex lot is 100,000 units of the base currency, so a 60-pip stop on one lot risks roughly $600 — not 60. Shares are one unit each. The calculator applies the right contract size per asset class, so the number it gives you is already in the units your broker expects.
Prop firms cap daily and total drawdown rather than per-trade size, so the binding constraint is how many losses a day can absorb. The presets fill a conservative risk-per-trade against each firm's published limits — but check your own account terms, since firms change them.
Because risk is fixed and the stop sets the price of each unit. A wider stop means each share can lose more, so you buy fewer to keep the dollar risk identical. This is why a tighter stop is not automatically safer — it changes size, not exposure.
Yes — free, unlimited, and it works without an account. There is no usage cap and no email wall. An account only matters if you want ORIN to grade the setups you are sizing.