Do not go over 1:100 at the start. That is the suggestion. Everybody has different levels though.
Different places have different limit on leverage. Some countries have higher and other lower FYI .
Leverage refers to using small amount to control the larger amount of something else. Usually as individuals, we apply leverage to some extent in our usual life. For e.g. you want to buy a small house worth $200,000. Then you might pay 20% of it, i.e. $40,000 as down payment. This down payment is leveraged to allow you to buy a bigger house worth $200,000. Therefore, leverage in this case is $200,000/$40,000= 5 times.
Let’s understand the use of leverage in Forex market. There is a relationship between leverage & its impact on the Forex market. The higher is the leverage, the greater is the volatility of your equity account. The small is the leverage; the small is the volatility of your equity account. In the trading course, we usually talk about using less than 10 times of effective leverage.
When we use higher leverage, a few no of losing trades can usually be compensated by the winning trades.
With leverage trader is able to trade more than he had in his capital he use less amount from his capital and trade a big lot . If leverage is not there we have to trade 1:1 . Then forex will be the business of just rich people. Now small investors can also trade with leverage in forex market.
Thank God you bumped the thread [I]again[/I] to mention it: without such devastating insights, these threads that are more than a decade old would never see the light of day again at all, and what a tragedy that would be … 
interestingly true