Risk per trade (%)

### Why the number is small This is arithmetic, not superstition, and you can check every line of it yourself. Risk 1% and ten losses in a row leave you down about 9.6%. Ugly, boring, survivable. Risk 5% and those same ten losses leave you down about 40%. Then the second problem starts, because drawdown recovery is not symmetric: a 10% hole needs an 11% gain to climb out of, a 50% hole needs a 100% gain. The deeper you dig, the harder the maths works against you. Losing streaks are not a hypothetical. Any approach with a win rate under 100% produces them. The only open question is what size you happen to be trading when yours arrives. ### Why 0.3% on funded accounts Because a funded account carries a kill switch you do not control. FTMO's Academy states that on a 2-Step Challenge the Maximum Daily Loss is 5% of initial capital and the Maximum Loss is 10%, and it is explicit that both are measured on **equity**, not on closed balance. Floating profit and loss on open trades counts. So do commissions and swaps. On a $100,000 account, the FTMO maximum-loss lesson puts it plainly: equity must not drop below $90,000. Now run our own rules against that. Our cap is 3 trades a day. At 1% risk, three losses take you about 3% down, which is most of the way to a 5% ceiling that is simultaneously counting your floating losses, your commissions and your swaps. There is nothing left over for a bad fill or a position still open. At 0.3%, those same three losses cost roughly 0.9%. That is the real reason for the small number. It is not timidity. It is choosing a risk figure that leaves the firm's kill switch a long way out of reach, instead of one you brush up against on an ordinary bad day. ### Risk creep is the actual killer Blown accounts rarely come from one reckless trade. They come from a ladder: 1%, then 2% to make back yesterday, then 5% on the one that feels certain. Each rung is defensible in the moment. Notice when the ladder gets climbed. After a loss, almost never after a win. That tells you the decision was about the last result, not about the setup in front of you. So fix the number before the session starts, write it down, and let position size do all the adapting.