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The smallest account that can honour 1% risk at a 0.01 lot minimum, by stop size

On EURUSD, a pip on 0.01 lot is $0.10. A stop of S pips therefore risks 0.10 times S dollars. For that to be 1% of the account, the account has to be 100 times that, which is 10 times S.

5 pip stop: $50 account.
10 pip stop: $100.
20 pip stop: $200.
30 pip stop: $300.
50 pip stop: $500.

Below those sizes the smallest trade you can place already risks more than 1%. A $100 account using a 30 pip stop at 0.01 lot is risking $3, which is 3%.

If the minimum lot is 0.1, multiply everything by 10: a 10 pip stop needs $1,000.

Other symbols move the numbers. USDJPY at 153: a pip on 0.01 lot is about 6.5 cents, so a 10 pip stop needs about $65. Gold, where 0.01 lot is one ounce on most contracts, risks the dollar size of the stop: a $3 stop is $3, so 1% needs $300.

So on a small account the 1% rule may not be reachable with wide stops. The choices are tighter stops, a smaller contract size from the broker, or accepting 2% or 3% knowingly, with the arithmetic in front of you. Check the contract size in the symbol specification before assuming.

Tight stops look like the way out for a small account, since a 6 pip stop needs only a $60 account for 1% at the minimum lot. The catch is cost. A 0.8 pip spread on a 6 pip stop is 13% of the stop, and on a 20 pip stop it's 4%. So the stop that fits the account carries more than three times the cost share. A trader with $100 who moves from a 20 pip to a 6 pip stop to meet the 1% rule has swapped a sizing problem for a cost problem, and the latter is harder to see because it's paid in small amounts on every trade.

If the account can't support 1%, size by the real figure and look at what it implies. A $100 account, 0.01 lot, 20 pip stop: $2 risked, 2%. Ten losses in a row at 2% leave 0.98 to the tenth power, 81.7% of the account, so an 18.3% drawdown. At the intended 1% it would be 90.4%, a 9.6% drawdown. So the account runs at double the loss for the same streak. That's a fact you can have in hand before the first trade, since it changes what a bad week looks like on the screen.

This is the table I wish someone had shown me when I opened my first account with $250. I was using 25 pip stops on GBPUSD at 0.01 lot, which works out at about 1% of that, and I thought I was being careful. Then I started trading gold the same way with a $6 stop and didn't notice I was risking well over 2% per trade until I had a bad week.

What I ended up doing was moving to a broker that offered cent accounts for a while, so the minimum position was a hundredth of the usual size. It let me trade the same stops at a real 1% while the account grew, and I switched back to a standard account once I passed about $1,500.

The other honest choice is just to accept the higher risk and write it down. I know a few people who ran 2% on a tiny account knowingly and treated it as the cost of learning, which is better than pretending 1% when the arithmetic says otherwise.

For anything that isn't a major pair, use the symbol specification instead of memory. In MT5, SYMBOL_TRADE_TICK_VALUE and SYMBOL_TRADE_TICK_SIZE give the value of a tick for one lot. Risk equals the stop distance divided by the tick size, times the tick value, times the lots. This works for indices, metals and crosses without knowing the contract size by heart. For an index with a tick size of 0.1 and a tick value of $0.10 per 0.01 lot, a 20 point stop is 200 ticks, so $20 of risk. A short script that prints this for each symbol you trade takes a few minutes and removes a source of error.

The lot size formula is risk dollars divided by the stop in pips times the pip value per lot. A $100 account, 1% is $1, a 10 pip stop and $10 a pip per lot: 1 divided by 100 is 0.01 lots, which works. With a 20 pip stop it's 0.005, which doesn't exist. The platform will let you send 0.01, and that doubles the risk to 2%. The honest options are to skip the trade or to take 2% on purpose and write it down. A trader who rounds up by default is running double the planned risk on every wide stop trade, and the journal shows it only if the planned risk column is filled in from the formula and not from the lot size actually used.

Simple and useful table. For accounts in non USD currencies the numbers move a bit, and on pairs like GBPJPY or gold the minimum risk per 0.01 lot is different again. Some brokers offer cent accounts or 0.001 lot minimums for exactly this reason. For anyone starting small, picking a broker with a smaller minimum, or widening the timeframe so stops are not tiny but the count of trades drops, keeps the 1% rule realistic.