Quote from chiefraven:
Hey spyder, i understand you try not to risk more than 2% of your total account size in any single trade.... and by using the risk calculator i was able to calculate how many shares i should buy if i set my risk % of total equity for a single trade to 2%, and set my initial stop in a stock at 2% (since i'm using the beginner method, where 2% is the initial stop, then 5% as trailing stop)
and since my account size is 40,000... if i set the total risk of a single trade to 2%, the most i lose is $800, which is great, but the shares i buy for a single stock is about $40,000 in value.... i do have a margin account... but this risk calculation seems to assume that you're only trading 1 stock at a time.... if i was using this amount to trade, i will be utilizing a lot of my margin buying power, and MBTrading only allows a certain amount of overnight buying power, which means at a time, i will only have about $98,000 of overnight buying power, and if one stock takes about $40,000 of my trading equity (margin) then i will only be able to hold 2 stocks at any given time...