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Old 07-21-2008, 03:12 AM
mykungfuisgood mykungfuisgood is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Posts: 43
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Well I think its because people have a poor understanding of margin/money management and leverage.

I think its what you describe 4xstar. Where people open too many positions and don't fully realize the risks that they are taking when they have a high leverage. I mean an easy example would be 100:1 or 400:1 on a 500 USD account.

At 100:1, a 1k lot on GBP/JPY costs approx 20 USD.
At 400:1, a 1k lot on GBP/JPY costs approx 5 USD.

Its written all over the site here to never risk more than 3% of your total account. So people go for the 400:1 and open 4 lots where as the person with 100:1 leverage would only open 1 lot. (each of these is 4% of your 500 USD account)

The trick comes in that at 100:1 with 1 lot open you are playing about 0.09 USD a pip and with the 400:1 with 4 lots open you are playing about 0.38 USD a pip. So with the 100:1 you can sustain a 5000+ drawdown, but with the 400:1 you can only sustain a 500 drawdown

<edits>
I think if you wanted to really blame anything, its that people don't sit down and take the time to work out the arithmetic. Just exactly how much drawdown can I sustain, exactly how much of my account am I using/risking if I open 'X' amount of lots, etc.

Its the same if you look at people deciding win/loss ratios instead of taking into account the risk/reward ratio aswell. So many people look for a 90% winning strategy even if its only 5 pips and they risk loosing 50 pips. But a 40% winning strategy that wins 100 pips and loses 40 pips will beat the first system. In fact the first system ends up being unprofitable over the long run.

Last edited by mykungfuisgood; 07-21-2008 at 03:23 AM.
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