Leverage is the most consequential mechanic on this platform, and the least honestly described across the industry. It scales your exposure, not your skill: every multiple it adds to a gain, it adds to a loss with the same arithmetic, and most beginner accounts that fail are ended by leverage rather than by bad analysis. This sheet builds the whole machinery — leverage, margin, equity, free margin, margin level — from one worked account, with the loss side shown in the same breath as the gain side every time.
Leverage: a loan you didn't ask for, decoded
Leverage is written as a ratio — 1:30, 1:20, 1:2 — and the ratio reads simply: for every unit of your own money committed, the position can be that many times larger. At 1:30, a $1,000 deposit can hold a $30,000 position. The broker is, in effect, extending the rest; you carry the full profit and the full loss on the whole position, while your own money serves as the buffer that absorbs the loss side.
Two things make this different from a loan you would recognize. First, it is the default: open a retail CFD account and the leverage is already there, set by regulation per instrument class — typically 1:30 on major FX pairs in many jurisdictions, lower on more volatile markets. Second, nothing about it is optional inside a position: once the trade is open, every pip of movement is computed on the full position size, not on the money you put up. Leverage is not a turbo button you press. It is the water the product swims in.
The caps themselves are a piece of evidence worth reading. Regulators did not pick 1:30 for major FX out of caution in the abstract — the limits were introduced after measured retail losses at higher ratios, and the ladder below 1:30 (lower caps for indices, lower again for commodities and crypto) tracks how violently each market moves. When an offshore broker advertises 1:500 as a feature, it is offering you more of the exact mechanic that the measured data showed was emptying accounts. More leverage is not more opportunity. It is the same opportunity with a thinner buffer under it.
Margin: the deposit that holds the position open
Margin is the slice of your own money the platform sets aside while a position is open. It is not a cost, and it never leaves your account — it is held, like the deposit on a rented apartment, and released the moment the position closes. The amount is the position's full size divided by the leverage:
required margin = position size ÷ leverage
= $30,000 ÷ 30 = $1,000 on the worked account below
Margin answers a different question than exposure does, and the two are conflated constantly. Margin is what the position holds; exposure is what the position is. Profits and losses are calculated on the $30,000, not on the $1,000 — which is the entire story of this sheet in one sentence.
One worked account, five numbers
Take an account with a $2,000 balance and 1:30 leverage. Buy 0.25 lots of EUR/USD at 1.2000 — a position of €25,000, worth $30,000. Required margin is $1,000, and at 0.25 lots each pip is worth $2.50. Five numbers now describe everything that matters about this account:
| Number | Value at entry | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Balance | $2,000 | Settled cash. Changes only when a position closes |
| Equity | $2,000 + open P/L | Balance plus the open position's unrealized result — moves every tick |
| Used margin | $1,000 | Held against the open position |
| Free margin | equity − $1,000 | What remains for new positions and for absorbing losses |
| Margin level | (equity ÷ used margin) × 100 | The platform's health gauge: 200% at entry |
Now move the price and watch all five respond. EUR/USD rises 80 pips to 1.2080: the position gains 80 × $2.50 = $200, equity reads $2,200, free margin $1,200, margin level 220%. EUR/USD falls 80 pips to 1.1920 instead: the position loses the same $200, equity reads $1,800, free margin $800, margin level 180%. The price moved 0.67% — and the account moved 10%, because the position is 15 times the account's size. That multiple is the real leverage you are running, whatever the account setting says.
Keep falling and the gauge approaches its cliffs. At some margin level — commonly 100% — the platform stops you opening new positions and asks for action: the margin call. At a lower level — commonly 50% — it begins closing positions for you, largest loser first: the stop-out. The exact thresholds are published per account type, and the dedicated sheet on margin calls walks the full sequence. What matters here is the shape: the cliffs are not surprises, they are coordinates, computable in advance from numbers you already have.
Compute them for the worked account. Margin level reaches 100% when equity equals used margin — $1,000 — which means a $1,000 loss, or 400 pips at $2.50 each: EUR/USD at 1.1600. Stop-out at 50% means equity of $500, a $1,500 loss, 600 pips: 1.1400. Neither number is exotic — EUR/USD has crossed 400-pip ranges in ordinary months. Before this paragraph, those would have been surprises delivered by the platform at the worst possible moment. After it, they are two prices you can write next to the chart before clicking buy.
The symmetry nobody advertises
Every marketing page in this industry shows the gain side of leverage. The product's actual property is symmetry: 2× faster gains means 2× faster ruin, with no setting that buys one without the other. Run the worked account through a worse week — 300 pips against the position, which on EUR/USD is an ordinary bad stretch, not a crisis: 300 × $2.50 = $750, or 37.5% of the account, gone on a 2.5% move in the underlying. The same 300 pips in your favor pays the same $750. Nothing in the mechanism knows or cares which direction you bought.
This is why the practical control on leverage is not the account's ratio but your position size. The 1:30 setting determines what you could open; the lots you choose determine what you did open. The same $2,000 account holding 0.05 lots instead of 0.25 carries a position of $6,000 — three times the account instead of fifteen — and the same 300-pip stretch costs $150 instead of $750. Leverage hands you a range; sizing is where judgment actually lives, and the sizing sheets later in this survey treat it as the first decision of every trade, not the last. Nobody ever blew up an account because the leverage setting was available — accounts blow up because the position was opened at full reach.
Negative balance protection: what it guarantees, what it doesn't
Markets sometimes jump over prices rather than passing through them — a weekend gap, a sudden announcement — and a large enough jump can push an account past zero before any stop-out completes. Negative balance protection addresses exactly that case: for retail accounts in jurisdictions that mandate it, the broker resets a negative balance to zero and absorbs the difference. Your maximum loss is capped at the money in the account.
Put a worked number on the case it covers. Suppose the worked account had been carrying a much larger position — 2 lots, $20 per pip — into a weekend, and the pair reopens 150 pips through the stop-out level. That jump costs $3,000 on an account that only held $2,000: the stop-out fired at the first available price, but the first available price was already past empty. Without protection, you would owe the broker $1,000. With it, the account reads zero and the broker books the difference. The $2,000 is still gone in both versions — the protection caps the catastrophe, not the loss.
Be precise about what that does not say. It does not stop you losing the entire balance — it defines the floor as zero, not as safe. It typically does not cover professional-status accounts, which trade higher leverage in exchange for surrendering exactly this protection. And it is not a stop-loss: it does nothing about ordinary losses on the way down, only about the account going below empty. Protection from owing money is real and worth having. Protection from losing money is not on offer anywhere in this product, and any page implying otherwise is misdescribing it.
Check the numbers before the platform does
Everything on this sheet is arithmetic you can run before risking anything: margin from size and leverage, pip value from lots, the account-percentage cost of any move from the position-to-account ratio. The platform will compute all of it for you in real time — but by then you are in the trade. The order is the lesson: numbers first, position second.
The demo account runs this entire machinery with stage money — the same margin engine, the same thresholds, the same five gauges. Deliberately opening one oversized demo position and watching margin level fall through a bad afternoon teaches the relationship between these numbers faster than any sheet can, at a cost of exactly nothing. It is the rare case in trading where the lesson and the safety net are the same instrument, and it is the rehearsal this survey keeps pointing at for a reason.
Enter the size you actually plan to trade and see the margin held, the pip value, and what a routine adverse move does to your account — before the platform shows you live.