UK Spread Bet wrong position size?

Hi Guys,

I’m with Alpari UK and seem to be having an issue with my position size on my Spread Betting account.

I set a sell stop for AUDUSD last night and it took profit this morning 65pips. I used the pip value calculator on this site and worked out that each pip would be worth £3.17 at a size of 0.5lots/50,000.

Thing is my actually profit was only £30 (just over) instead of over £180 so I’m confused and obviously working out my position size incorrectly.

Can anyone help?

I’ve recently switched to a SB account from a normal account and didn’t have this problem before. My leverage is 1:500 any help would be really helpful guys.

I’ve emailed Alpari on this as I said above I used the calculator (babypips tools) to work out my pip value by putting in my account size, currency pair AUDUSD position size 0.5lots and price for GBPUSD etc.

As I said the pip value should have been £3.17 per pip gained/lossed. My trade took profit at 65pips gain .9875 down to .9810 but my actual profit was only £32.50 basically 50p per pip not £3.17.

Does this have anything to do with me now using my spread bet account or not or is it a simple case of mis-calculation?

Just had this from Alpari, didn’t know this?

‘‘With regards to spread betting, obviously if you enter 1 then that is £1 a point where if you were forex trading, entering 1 is 1 lot so £10 a point.
Entering 0.5 on spread betting is 50p a point so if you took 65 pips- 0.50 x 65 = £32.50.’’

I use a spreadbetting account for this reason. You enter the amount per pip you trade and of you go! I cant comment on entering lot sizes as i have never done it

OK finally figured it out it is as above.

With Alpari UK Spread Betting the lot size simply represents how many £’s per pip.

So for a normal Forex account I would trade say 1 lot of GBPUSD that would represent very roughly about £10 per pip.

With my spreadbetting account 1lot equals £1 per pip no matter what currency pair is traded. 8 lots = £8 per pip and so on.

Anyway most will probably know this already but it may help someone out if they got confused like I did changing from a normal account to a SB account.

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