Leverage & Margin Calculator

Use this handy Forex & Crypto Margin & Leverage Calculator to calculate accurately the amount of funds required to open a trading position, or used to open a new trade, based on the lot size and the available leverage offered by your broker.

What are Leverage & Margin in Trading?

Leverage allows a trader to control a larger position using less money (margin) and therefore greatly amplifies both profits and losses. Leveraged trading is also called margin trading.

Leverage will amplify potential profits and losses. For example, buying the EUR/USD at 1.0000 with no leverage, to take a total loss the price must go to zero, or to 2.0000 to double your investment. If you trade using the full 100:1 leverage, a price movement of 100 times less will produce the same profit or loss.

Margin is the capital a trader must put up to open a new position. It is not a fee or cost and is freed up again once the trade is closed. Its purpose is to protect the broker from losses. When losses cause a trader's margin to fall below a pre-defined stop out percentage, one, or all open positions, are automatically closed by the broker. A margin call warning from the broker may or may not precede such liquidation.

How Does Leverage Work

With 100:1 leverage a trader can open a position 100 times greater than they could without leverage. For example, if the cost to open a trading position of 0.01 lots of EUR/USD is $1,000 without leverage, and a broker offers 100:1 leverage, then a trader must use only $10 as margin. Of course, traders can also use little leverage, like 30:1 or 5:1, or no leverage at all.

Caution: Higher leverage ratios means higher risks. Most professional traders use a low leverage ratios, up to 5:1, or none at all, and a modest risk percentage per trade (2%).

How to Use the Leverage & Margin Calculator

Instrument: In this field traders can select from several forex crosses, including major and minor pairs, from the most popular cryptocurrencies (ADA, BTC, DOGE, ETH, LTC, Stellar, Ripple, etc), popular inidces and commodities, such as Gold, Silver and Oil. For our example, we will choose the EUR/USD.

Deposit currency: Margin values differ for forex pairs, and other financial instruments, and are subject to the current market quote. By selecting the deposit currency, it will be possible to accurately display the margin required to open a position, for the selected instrument, in the choosen currency (from AUD to ZAR). We will choose GBP as our deposit currency, for this example.

Leverage: In this field traders just need to input a leverage ratio. This could be the current leverage offered by the broker, or any other ratio, from as little as 1:1 to 6000:1 to simulate the amount of margin used to open a position. For our example, we will select a leverage of 30:1.

Lots (trade size): Just enter the lot size. Remember, in forex 1 lot is 100,000 currency units per lot, but units per lot vary for non-forex pairs. So, in this field there's also the option of switching between lots and units for the calculations. For our example, we will use a trade size of 0.10.

Next, we click the "Calculate" button.

The results: Using all the data above the Leverage & Margin Calculator tell us that to open a trade position, long or short, of a 0.10 lot EUR/USD, with 30:1 leverage, and with the current EUR/GBP exchange rate of 0.90367, we would need a margin of 301,22 GBP.

You might also find our What is Leverage in Forex and How to Use It article useful. It's packed with useful info that can help traders in understanding what is the leverage in forex and how to use it safely in FX trading, how leverage has a direct effect on a trading account's capital, what is a margin call, how to avoid a margin call and much more.

Use this Forex Margin Calculator on Your Website

Our tools and calculators are developed and built to help the trading community to better understand the particulars that can affect their account balance and to help them on their overall trading.

Regardless if investors trade the Forex market, cryptocurrencies or any other financial instruments, our complete suite of accurate Forex tools and calculators are programmed to work with any data inputted.

By using live market data, our set of calculators allows traders to always get the most accurate results possible, and they work with most FX pairs, metals and even cryptocurrencies. Also, these great calculators are translated into 23 different languages including Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Chinese.

With an intuitive design and a user-friendly interface, these calculators can be easily integrated with any web page. The substantial advantage is that they are completely unbranded, and can be fully customizable to any color scheme and to fit the layout of any web page.

If you're a webmaster and consider that these calculators can create added value for your website on a "Tools/Calculators" section, you are free to embed them on your website.

The embedding widget can be used as it is or it can be fully configured to match your website’s colours. When you are happy with the settings, simply copy/paste the final code to embed the tool/calculator widget on your page.