At Fintokei, risk management is everything. You don’t need to hit home runs—you need to protect your capital, trade with control, and stay in the game long enough to grow. That’s why we have both a recommended and a maximum “risk on open trades” rule.
✅ Recommended risk on open trades
We strongly recommend keeping your risk between 0.5% and 1% of your account equity.
This is the industry standard for sustainable trading and the sweet spot for long-term consistency.
Why it works:
• You can survive losing streaks without breaching the account
• It encourages proper trade planning and realistic take-profits
• It’s what most professional traders actually use
💡 Example:
If you’re trading a $100,000 account, risking 1% means you’re risking $1,000 max.
A few consecutive losses won’t ruin your journey—because you’re playing the long game.
👀 This is all why it is very much in line with who we are looking for. Read more here
🚨 Maximum allowed risk on open trades: 3%
While we don’t micromanage every trade, we do monitor risk exposure of open trades and its spikes—especially those that cross 3%.
The risk on open trades is calculated based on StopLosses set by the trader (if applicable and visible in platform) and on the Value at Risk (VaR) analysis over a specific period or trading session, whichever is lower.
Value at Risk (VaR) is a well-known and standardized risk calculation method which considers the net exposure size, holding period, instrument volatility, and — in the case of multiple asset exposures — correlations between them. The confidence level is set to 95%.
In practice, we apply a client friendly approach by evaluating both the SL-based risk and the Value at Risk (VaR), and using the lower value of the two. This means that even if a client sets the stop-losses corresponding for example to a 4% overall risk on all open trades, but the calculated VaR is only 2%, the effective risk considered by our risk management tools will be 2%.
📌 If you therefore use SL on every trade and keep your overall risk on open trades below 3% at any time you have nothing to worry about!
However, if both of the metrics result in more than 3% risk, then you are:
• ⚠️ Violating our anti-gambling and risk control policies
• 📩 Likely to receive a warning email
• ❌ And if you will repeat this or any gambling practice again, it may lead to your account being put under Consistency Rules restrictions.
This isn’t about punishing bold traders. It’s about ensuring your strategy is actually sustainable, and that your results could be replicated in the real market—without blowing up accounts.
💬 What do we mean by “risk on open trades”?
If you’re scaling into a trade or managing partial entries/exits, or if you trade across multiple instruments at the same time, we count the entire net exposure of all open trades at a certain time—not just one small part of it.
Trying to spread risk over multiple identical entries doesn’t bypass this rule. Our system evaluates total net exposure and effective stop distance across the trade setup.
📊 How exactly do we calculate 3% max risk on open trades?
Let’s look at a few practical examples 👇
✅ Example 1: One trade with a stop-loss – all good
Account Equity at trade entry: $100,000
Trade: BUY XAUUSD 1.00 lot
Stop-loss: 30 pips
Value per pip on 1 lot = $10
Total risk = 1 lot x 30 pips × $10 = $300
$300 is 0.3% of $100,000
This is well within the 3% limit. No issue.
⚠️ Example 2: Multiple trades on different instruments
Account Equity at trade entries: $100,000
3 different open trades at some point of time:
BUY XAUUSD 0.50 lot
BUY EURUSD 0.30 lot
BUY GBPUSD 0.20 lot
All trades share the same stop-loss distance: 50 pips
Total exposure: 0.50 lot + 0.30 lot + 0.20 lot = 1.00 lot
Total risk: (0.50 lot x 50 pips + 0.30 lot x 50 pips + 0.20 lot x 50 pips) × $10 = $500 risk
$500 is 0.5% of the account Equity at the trade entries, which was $100,000
Still within the allowed 3% limit, all good.
⚠️ Example 3: One trade on XAUUSD without stop-loss (VaR applied)
Account Equity at trade entry: $100,000
Trade: BUY XAUUSD 1.50 lot
No stop-loss set
Since there’s no SL, we apply Value at Risk (VaR) based on the instrument’s historical volatility
For a given holding period on XAUUSD, the volatility was estimated at 100 pips (due to high impact news), so in simple words, our internal models estimate that during volatile conditions (e.g. news spikes) on this particular instrument the price could move 100 pips against you.
Risk estimation: 1.50 lot x 100 pips × $10 per pip x 1.645 (Z-score at 95% confidence level) = $2,467.5 risk
$2,467.5 is approximately 2.47% of the account Equity at trade entry
📌 This is also still within the allowed 3% limit, but getting close to it.
📌 If you had opened 2.00 lots instead, still without the SL, the risk would exceed the 3% threshold based on the above mentioned VaR analysis—and you’d likely receive a warning.
📌 Even if you’re confident in your setup, trading without a stop-loss is generally considered as a high-risk —especially on volatile instruments like gold – and we do not recommend it.
Please bear in mind that all of these are simplified examples, and the reality can get a bit more complex (different trades open on multiple instruments in different directions, with different correlations etc.), but we hope these gave you a good basic understanding of how we measure the risk.
❓ Why do we limit risk on open trades if there’s already a daily drawdown rule?
The daily drawdown limit protects the account as a whole. But the max risk on open trades is here to ensure that no single trade idea or setup open at one time can put the entire account at immediate risk.
It’s a safeguard against:
• ❌ Overleveraged “all-in” trades
• ❌ One-shot gambling behavior
• ❌ Strategies that rely on luck, not logic
Without this rule, someone could risk 100% of the daily loss limit in just one trade—which defeats the point of evaluating consistency, discipline, and real trading ability.
📌 Bottom line: Sustainable trading is about controlling risk trade-by-trade, growing up your account and profits step by step in long-term, and surviving well even several day long losing streak.
🧠 Final tip
You don’t need to max out risk to show us you’re a good trader.
You just need to prove that your approach can last longer than a lucky streak.
📌 Stay under 1%. Stay in control. Stay in the game. That’s the kind of trader we love to back.