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Do you know exactly what a forex lot is? If you trade Forex you need to understand all of the language and terms exactly. Lots are the base unit size of any given forex transaction. You may have heard “I will take 5 lots of the euro against the British pound”. In general, one standard lot is equivalent to 100,000 units of the base currency.

You may remember that the base currency is essentially just the first currency of a currency pair, for example in the EUR/USD currency pair the base currency is the EUR and the ‘quote’ currency is the USD; this means that you if you buy 1 lot (100,000 EUR) you will pay for it in USD and if you buy 5 lots of the Euro as stated earlier, you would pay for 500,000 Euros using the equivalent amount of British pounds.

You may remember that the base currency is essentially just the first currency of a currency pair, for example in the EUR/USD currency pair the base currency is the EUR and the ‘quote’ currency is the USD; this means that you if you buy 1 lot (100,000 EUR) you will pay for it in USD and if you buy 5 lots of the Euro as stated earlier, you would pay for 500,000 Euros using the equivalent amount of British pounds.

So now that we know what it is, what is the significance or use of all this? Okay, so if you have a 10,000 dollar account with your favorite forex broker, who gives you leverage of 100:1 (for every dollar in your account you control 100 dollars worth of any currency in the forex market) you can gain full control of a maximum of 10 lots of any base currency in the market. But if you have a micro account but want to control lots 100,000 units in size, you will definitely need to increase the amount of money in your account. Do not make the erroneous decision to use large leverage to control lots greater than permissible for your account type as the risk just isn’t worth it.

I recommend that when you start out trading forex market currencies you begin with a small number of lots typically between 1 and 3. With time you may find that this is plenty and sufficient to be a successful trader in the market. Once you become more experienced, and possibly have 10,000 dollars and above in your account, you can increase the size of your lots and the number of lots to trade in accordance to your strategy.

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