I’m completely new to FX and started researching it over the past few weeks. I have got a very basic understanding except with regards to risk V Capitol. I have just opened an account FXCM $50.00 (big spender I know). I only want to risk around .5 - 1% each trade but how do I work this risk out so I don’t loose all the money on one trade?
Hi New one,
First, welcome to BabyPips and to FXCM 
It’s great you’re asking these risk management questions before you begin trading. Too many people don’t bother learning the important of risk management until after they’ve suffered a bigger loss than they were prepared to.
1% of $50 would be 50 cents. The minimum trade size is 1 micro lot on which you’re risking approximately 10 cents per pip. That means, if you wanted to limit your risk to 1%, you’d have to limit your risk to 5 pips. That’s not a lot of wiggle room, when you consider that the spread itself is typically 1 to 2 pips on a major currency pair.
Starting with the bare minimum in your account means you may have to risk more than 1% of your equity in order to have sufficient wiggle for your trades to have a chance of success. Otherwise, you might find that you’re frequently getting stopped out of trades for 50 cent losses. While it’s true this is only 1% of your account. If this happens very often with few to no winners in between, you might find that your account equity slowly goes down, in a “death by 1000 cuts”.
It’s important to only invest an amount that you’re comfortable with. If that amount is $50, then you may have to consider increasing the percentage of your equity you’re willing to risk per trade to 5%. That would be $2.50 allowing you to risk 25 pips per trade, which at least gives you some chance of success with some short term trading strategies.
The alternative, if you are comfortable investing more is to increase your equity, so that you can stick to risking only 1% but on a larger amount of capital. This article by DailyFX trade instructor James Stanley contains more tips on risk management.
Jason