Calculation confused, please help

This may be very stupid, but I really am confuse.

In my understanding, full account lot is US$1,000 per lot. Transfer it into units, it's equal to 100,000 unit. For which, 1 (one) pip equal to US$10. Please correct me if I'm wrong so far.

In Oanda, for 100,000 unit traded, 1 pip equal to US$10. But 100,000 units are not equal to US$1,000. To get 100,000 units, you have to provide US$3,913, more or less. US$1,000 only gets you 25,556 units. Which mean, you get US$2.55 per pip for every US$1,000 you trade in Oanda. This is with the highest leverage. The smaller your leverage, the less units you get.

Is there something I don't know about leverage or anything which misled me (and take it that for every US$1,000 I trade, a single pip is equal to US$10)?

And do other brokers also use this calculation, or they values US$10/pip for every US$1,000 you trade?

Thank you.

I don't know Oanda's policy in detail, but brokers can have different margin requirements.I suggest you go to babypips.com to the School section and look for the lesson College: the Number One cause of Death for Forex Traders, Leverage the Killer.

Disregarding the sensationalist title of the article, there's some very good and useful info you can get by reading it.

Oanda has 2% margin per base pair.

So for GBPUSD the margin requirement would be: (contract size X price) X leverage

(100,000 X 1.9566) X .02 = 3913.20

You are also mixing up margin and contract values. A standard lot is 100,000 per base currency, a mini lot is 10,000 per base currency, and a micro is 1,000 per base currency. How much leverage your broker offers will depend on how much capital you have to put up to enter into a position. Pip values are different for certain pairs.

Zen, Oanda has maximum leverage of 50-1. For the type of situation you describe above you need to find a broker that offers 200-1 leverage.

more leverage = you losing more period.

Not always....

Sorry, I got to spend the whole day trying to digest what's leverage and margin according to babypips.com, and compare calculation in it with my own strategy. Mind you, but 2 things: 1. Babypips.com talking about leverage with scare tactic in mind, and undermining those who doesn't swing trading. I trade just once a day, with stop loss never exceeded 50 pips. Supposed I have $3,000 and trade $1,000 of it, if one pip value equal to $10, I still have to loose 190 pips before I got margin call---and that would be impossible since my stop loss never more than 50 pips. And GBPUSD doesn't move 200 pips everyday. Yes, it does move more than that from time to time, but not everyday. 2. They're talking about a novice trader who trade without a plan. I have spent years learning about forex trading, and I never find a single strategy which tell me to add another 80 lots at once just because the one lot you trade today is profiting. I did find advice that I should never add lot during trading. Close one, calculate your present margin, then, maybe, you could add another lot at the next trade. But back to Oanda's calculation. I checked again every lesson I ever studied about forex trading. All of them said that at $1,000/lot, one pip is equal to $10. I checked alpari.uk website, for GBPUSD, for every 100,000 unit, one tick value is equal to $10. I didn't find any reference whether 100,000 unit is equal to US$1,000, but I find that micro lot (0.01 lot) is equal to 1,000 unit. So, based on this, I assume 100,000 unit is equal to US$1,000 in alpari.uk. This confirm what I understood so far, that for 1 standard lot of $1,000, 1 pip is equal to $10. But in Oanda, 100,000 unit is not equal to US$1,000. So, may I presume that 1 standard lot in Oanda is not US$1,000 but depends on your leverage. If your leverage is 50:1, one standard lot is US$3,913.20. Is this correct?

Correct. But you also gain more.

Say if you have a system with risk:reward ratio 1:1, one trade per day, and 60% to 80% win on average every month, will you hold on to that thought even after a couple of years trading?