Adding Up Total Open Risk Across Several Trades

[Fairman]

Adding Up Total Open Risk Across Several Trades

Scenario: a 20,000-dollar account holds three trades. Trade one is a EUR/USD long with 0.30 lots and a 30-pip stop. Trade two is a GBP/USD long with 0.20 lots and a 40-pip stop. Trade three is a USD/JPY short with 0.25 lots and a 35-pip stop, with USD/JPY at 150.

Work it out trade by trade. EUR/USD: 0.30 lots times 30 pips times 10 dollars is 90 dollars. GBP/USD: 0.20 times 40 times 10 is 80 dollars. USD/JPY: pip value per standard lot is 6.67 dollars, so 0.25 times 35 times 6.67 is about 58 dollars.

Total open risk: 90 plus 80 plus 58 is 228 dollars, which is 1.14 percent of 20,000.

Now check the structure. Trades one and two are both long a non-dollar currency against the dollar, and trade three is short USD against yen. All three are bets on dollar weakness. In a dollar rally, all three stop out together. So the effective exposure to one theme is the full 1.14 percent.

If your rule says total open risk may not exceed 1 percent for correlated trades, you are above the limit.

To fix it, reduce one trade or close one. Alternatively, move a stop to breakeven on a winner, which removes its risk from the total.

Takeaway: add up the risk of all positions, and group by shared currency.

Practical step: build a small table of your open trades with risk in dollars, and total them by currency.

[Shadow Trader]

A buy limit sits on the server. The platform loses connection, a router restarts, or the computer goes to sleep. Meanwhile, price drops to the limit and the order fills. The position is now open, and nobody is watching.

When the connection returns, the terminal shows a new position that appeared on its own. If the order carried a stop and target, those are in place. If it didn't, the position is naked.

The same applies to stop orders triggering during an outage and to existing positions hitting their stops.

The risk is in the assumption that the screen shows the true state. Pending orders are live on the server, and they act whether or not a client is connected.

Habits that reduce the risk: always attach stops to pending orders, rather than adding them after the fill. Cancel unneeded pending orders before leaving the desk. Keep the mobile app logged in as a backup view.

For anyone who has stepped away from a quiet market and returned to a surprise position, the lesson sticks quickly.

What state was the position in when an order filled during a disconnect?

[TradeLock]

The arithmetic in the opening post is right, and the structural point is the one worth expanding: three positions at 1.14% of the account are not three
separate 1.14% risks. If the dollar rallies, all three reach their stop at the same level of the same move, so the practical loss is close to the sum,
not the average.

One addition to the journal: a correlation note per open position, describing what has to happen for the position to be wrong rather than just where the
stop sits. For a long EUR/USD and a short USD/JPY, that description is similar, and the journal should make that visible at the time, not in the
monthly review.

The reverse case matters too. Two positions that look different on the ticket can be the same bet. A long EUR/USD and a long GBP/USD against the
dollar are one position in two pairs, and a trader who thinks of them as two separate risks will size the total at twice what it should be.

[PTScalper]

Yeah, you are right with that sum, on another hand i like to open several positions with same SL level, because i define first of all safe level as stop loss and after i trade in defined zone, nesere the stop loss i tend to open more positions with same lot size so the risk is lower that simple sum of count positions times initial risk.

Plus thanks to that i scalp in that zone volatility, there is real high chance, that i will allready have some of positions/scalps closed with profit