FAQ

Traders are able to use the Calculator in their trading at the speed of light and actually set up their trades faster than they used to do by hand. Once you get familiar with it, you'll be at that speed too. New things frequently seem complicated at first, but once we get to know them, they become second nature. And the learning curve for these tools is a gentle one.

And then there's the question of errors. In talking with many traders and our own experience, we've found that the mistakes we all make when we're moving too fast are the ones that really bite us and end up being very costly.

Our approach is all about helping traders eliminate those mistakes as much as possible. One mistake avoided will more than make up for the cost of the Calculator.

We invite you to look through our complete Knowledge Base with in-depth training in the use of the Calculator. See the Support Menu at the top of the web site. We teach the use of the Calculator thru movies and clearly-written explanation. And we're happy to answer your questions too.

No, not at all – nothing can keep you from taking losses other than your own experience and luck. Think of a "Loss-recovery strategy" like a sharp Samarai sword. If you know how to use it properly you can do wonders – if you don't, you could cut your leg off. It's all in how you use it. There is no guarantee made or implied in your use of the Calculator or the Trade Log that you will not take a loss. They are simply tools to let you calculate how much you are risking per trade. This in turn makes it easier for you to understand the risk you take and trade responsibly.

Forex is an unpredictable business and entering and exiting the actual trade, as well as determining correct position size and leverage is your complete responsibility. Please read this risk warning:

Forex is an unpredictable business, and entering and exiting the actual trade, as well as determining correct position size and leverage, are your complete responsibility.

Trading foreign exchange on margin carries a high level of risk, and may not be suitable for all investors. The high degree of leverage can work against you as well as for you. Before deciding to trade foreign exchange you should carefully consider your monetary objectives, level of experience, and risk appetite. The possibility exists that you could sustain a loss of some or all of your deposited funds and therefore you should not speculate with capital that you cannot afford to lose. You should be aware of all the risks associated with foreign exchange trading, and seek advice from an independent advisor if you have any doubts. Past returns are not indicative of future results. Forex Smart Tools or Forex Trade Logs, and its affiliates assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or omissions in these materials. They do not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information, text, graphics, links or other items contained within these materials or within the tools it makes available. Forex Smart Tools or Forex Trade Logs and its affiliates shall not be liable for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including without limitation, losses, lost revenues, or lost profits that may result from these materials. Use of The Calculator and/or The Trade Log does not protect you from incurring losses, and no guarantees are made or implied that losses will not occur if you use these tools. This is not a solicitation to buy or sell currency or futures.

 

No, the Calculator helps you determine where your entries, stops and take profit values should be, but it's always up to you to actually enter the trades on your broker's platform and pull the trigger yourself.

You still place your trades directly on your broker's platform.  The Calculator works alongside your trading platform to help you correctly position size and plan for the trades you are about to place.

There's really nothing specific about any mentor's trading method that is tied in to the Calculator. We have tried to think about all our experiences in our years of trading and all the styles of trading we have learned and heard about and from that made one all-encompassing great tool for about 90% of those styles.

Everyone - regardless of how they trade - benefits from knowing their ideal lot size as they go into a trade so they do not risk more than a certain amount they can live with if the trades fails, whether they do a cost average or just a single make-it-or-stop trade.

Many people use stop and reverse or cost average, and all of them need to know where their break-even point is and what their risk is. Many people feather-in to a trade and need to be able to place multiple positions without ballooning their risk.

And there are methods that we use, and know other people use, such as the open-leg cost average technique, or straddling a trade on either side, that we have included in the calculator pages.

Do you think there's a correlation between about 95% of people not understanding what money management is about and 95% of people failing at Forex? We do....

In the Calculator, the equity figure can be automatically imported from your broker's platform if you use an MT4 broker.

As we show in our money management series of trainings, the more frequently you update equity the better this works for true Adaptive Positioning, which has the potential to be very profitable.

If you don't use MT4 you can automatically update your equity by keeping the Trade Log up to date with your current completed trades and linking the Calculator to the Trade Log. You can also manually modify equity as you trade.

The Forex Tester can also automatically update equity on your test runs too.

The Calculator does not account for rollover or commission fees, so from time to time the actual break-even point for you might vary by a few pips depending on how long you've been in a particular trade and whether you've had a commission charge applied to your trade while you were holding it. We explain this and how to work with this in our educational videos.

Yes, the Calculator does - but it does not include every single wiggle of spread. Why? Because the spread on many platforms changes so often that it would make you crazy watching it. We have created our own average of the spread value over the last several seconds. This way it stays pretty true to what your broker is showing. It will not accommodate pre-news or news spikes in spread because that change can happen very quickly and be extremely volatile. The Calculator works very well in normal trading conditions to stay true to what you see.

The Calculator allows you to set up an unlimited number of individual brokerage accounts (equity and currency), each with a name or number code on the setup page, then just choose that broker from a drop-down menu from any of the Calculator pages. Each brokerage setup can hold unique infomration, such as which equity you hold your assets in, what kind of lots you trade (units, minis, standard, spread-bet, etc., and other factors.

No, the software works on a PC running any version of Windows or a Mac in emulator mode.