Pip Value Calculator
Pip value is what one pip of movement is worth at your position size. For a standard lot of 100,000 units it is 10 units of the quote currency. Multiply it by your stop distance in pips and you have the risk on the trade.
What a pip is worth
Defaults are one standard lot on a pair quoted in your own currency. Change the rate for a pair that is not.
Pip value is units × pip size ÷ rate. The rate only matters when the pair’s second currency is not the one your account is held in.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored.
How the number is built
A pip is the smallest conventional step in a currency quote — the fourth decimal place on most pairs and the second on pairs quoted in yen. That is a distance, not an amount of money.
Pip value converts the distance into money:
Pip value = units × pip size ÷ quote-to-account rate
The units term is the one that moves everything. A standard lot is 100,000 units, a mini is 10,000, a micro is 1,000 — so the same pip is worth 10, 1 or 0.10 depending only on the size you chose.
A worked example
Take the defaults: one standard lot of 100,000 units, a pip of 0.0001, quoted in your own currency, with a stop 40 pips away.
Pip value is 100,000 × 0.0001 ÷ 1 = 10.00. One pip moves the position by ten units of your account currency.
Risk at the stop is 10.00 × 40 = 400.00. That is the whole loss if the stop fills at the level.
Now run it backwards, which is the useful direction. If you will risk 200 on the trade, you need half the size — 0.50 lots. The calculator reports that, because sizing from the risk is the order the decision should be made in.
And the last output puts it in perspective. At a pip value of 10, a 10,000 account moves 1% every ten pips — a distance many pairs cover in a quiet hour.
When the rate matters
If the second currency in the pair is your account currency, the rate is 1 and the pip value never changes. A standard lot is always worth 10 a pip, whatever the price does.
If it is not, the pip value moves as the conversion rate moves. Your risk on an open position drifts without you doing anything, which is the part people are surprised by. The effect is small over a day and real over weeks.
Either way the order of operations is the same. Stop distance first, pip value second, size third. Choosing a size and then finding a stop that fits it is the inversion that produces the accidents.
The three lot sizes, and picking one
There are three conventional sizes and the pip value scales directly with them. A standard lot is 100,000 units and a pip is worth 10. A mini lot is 10,000 and a pip is worth 1. A micro lot is 1,000 and a pip is worth 0.10.
Which one is right falls out of the account and the stop, not out of preference. Risking 1% of a 5,000 account is 50, and a 40-pip stop divides that into 1.25 per pip — so the size is between one and two mini lots, and a standard lot would be ten times too large.
That arithmetic is why micro lots exist. On a small account with a wide stop, a mini lot can already be more risk than the account should carry, and without a smaller unit the only remaining adjustment is a tighter stop — which means moving the stop to fit the size, the exact inversion this page argues against.
What it costs before any pips are made
The spread is quoted in pips too, and it is paid immediately. A two-pip spread on a 40-pip stop is 5% of your risk gone before the position has moved.
Spreads widen outside a pair’s active hours and on exotic pairs, sometimes by several multiples. The same 40-pip stop costs far more to enter at the wrong hour.
On this site’s shared series a round trip is 2% of a median bar’s range, which is the same arithmetic in a different market: participating has a fixed price and it is paid whether the idea was right or not.
The original data
Of the 24,971 unique videos in research/search-study-corpus.jsonl, zero have an
instruction-shaped title about pip value. Lot size appears in 14 at a median of 127,651 views
across 13 channels — and 50% of those titles use explicitly calculator-shaped language, the
highest share measured anywhere in the corpus. Forex overall appears in 301 at a median of 18,778.
The counts come from site/rank_tools2.py.
Half the lot-size titles are people asking for a calculator, and the median on those 14 videos is 127,651. That is the clearest single piece of evidence in this whole ranking that the audience wants arithmetic rather than explanation — and there is no video at all on the pip value that the lot size depends on.
The answer to the question on that chart is that the stop distance does not choose the size — your risk does. Divide what you will lose by the pip value times the distance, and the size falls out. A size chosen first and a stop fitted afterwards is the same error in every market.
When it fails
In a dead session the spread becomes most of the available movement. The pair barely travels, the quoted spread widens, and a 40-pip stop that was reasonable at the open is now a large share of the range the hour will produce. Nothing in the pip-value arithmetic is wrong — the trade was simply taken in conditions where the cost of participating exceeded what participating could return.
The second failure is a yen pair with the wrong pip size. Using 0.0001 instead of 0.01 makes the answer wrong by a factor of a hundred, and it is the most common error on this calculation.
A third is forgetting the conversion. On a pair whose second currency is not yours, the pip value you started with is not the one you will exit at.
A fourth is sizing from leverage rather than from the stop. Available leverage is a broker’s ceiling; risk is your decision.
A fifth is ignoring the spread in the risk. It is paid on entry and it is part of what the trade costs to attempt.
And a sixth is trading exotic pairs early. Their spreads are multiples of the majors and their pip values are frequently in a currency you do not hold.
Related
Forex covers the market’s structure and the sessions that decide when a pair moves. Lot size is the unit this calculation turns into money. And currency pair explains the quoting convention that makes the conversion rate matter at all.
Lot arithmetic is where I have seen more expensive accidents than anywhere else in forex, and they are all the same accident: the size was worked out after the trade idea rather than before it. Doing it in the other order takes thirty seconds and removes the entire class of mistake.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.