You do not need to place trades yourself to benefit from understanding the units they are measured in. When your Social Copies page shows a mirrored size of 0.30 lot, or a master's profile says a typical stop is 25 pips, those numbers translate directly into dollars — and dollars are what you actually have at risk.
Pips
A pip is the standard unit of price movement in a currency pair. For most pairs it is the fourth decimal place: EUR/USD moving from 1.0850 to 1.0851 is one pip. For yen pairs it is the second decimal: USD/JPY from 150.00 to 150.01 is one pip. Many platforms quote an extra digit — a "pipette", a tenth of a pip — which is why you will see prices like 1.08503.
Pips are a distance, not a value. A 20-pip move is worth nothing until you know the position size.
Lots
A lot is the unit of position size. One standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency — 100,000 euros in EUR/USD. A mini lot is 0.10 of that (10,000 units) and a micro lot is 0.01 (1,000 units). Platforms show sizes in lots with two decimals: 0.30 lot is 30,000 units.
Lots and pips combine into dollars through the pip value: how much one pip is worth for a given size. For pairs quoted against the dollar (EUR/USD, GBP/USD, AUD/USD):
| Size | Units | Value of one pip |
|---|---|---|
| 1.00 lot | 100,000 | $10.00 |
| 0.10 lot | 10,000 | $1.00 |
| 0.30 lot | 30,000 | $3.00 |
| 0.01 lot | 1,000 | $0.10 |
So a 0.30-lot EUR/USD trade with a 25-pip stop risks 25 × $3.00 = $75. That is the number that matters.
For gold (XAU/USD) one lot is 100 ounces and one point ($1.00 of price) is worth $100; a $3 move on 0.10 lot is $30. For Bitcoin against USDT the contract size is 1 coin per lot and the arithmetic is simply price change times lots.
Margin
Margin is the deposit the platform holds against a position — the position size divided by the leverage. A 1.00-lot EUR/USD position ($108,500 at 1.0850) at 100:1 needs $1,085 of margin. Your remaining balance is free margin; if losses eat through it the position is stopped out. Margin is not a fee; it is returned when the trade closes. But it caps how many positions can be open at once, which is one reason masters size trades the way they do.
From the master's lot to your risk
Proportional copying does the conversion for you. Suppose a master has $50,000 in their copy account and opens 1.50 lots of EUR/USD with a 30-pip stop. Their risk is 30 × $15 = $450, or 0.9% of their account. You follow with $5,000 — a tenth. The platform mirrors 0.15 lot; your risk on the same trade is 30 × $1.50 = $45, also 0.9% of your allocation. The percentage is preserved; the dollars scale.
The Risk Multiplier in the copy form changes this. At 2x you would hold 0.30 lot and risk $90, 1.8%. At 0.5x, 0.075 lot and $22.50. The multiplier is the one number that lets you take more or less of the master's risk than they take themselves.
Pip values on other pairs
The $10-per-pip rule holds only where the dollar is the quote currency. For USD/JPY the pip value in dollars changes with the rate: at 150.00 one pip on a standard lot is worth about $6.67 (1,000 yen ÷ 150). For EUR/GBP it is about $12.50 at typical rates, because the pip is in pounds and must be converted. The platform does the conversion on every ticket; the point for a copier is only that "20 pips" is not the same money on every pair. A master who trades USD/JPY and EUR/USD with the same lot size is risking about a third less per pip on the yen pair, and the Recent Trades dollar column will show it.
Spreads are quoted in pips too, and the same table converts them to cost. A 0.3-pip spread on 0.30 lot is 90 cents per trade; a 2-pip spread on the same size is $6. Over 200 trades a month the difference is the difference between a scalping strategy that works and one that pays everything to the spread.
A quick check you can do on any profile
Open a master's Recent Trades. Take a typical trade: size in lots, entry, exit. Multiply pips by pip value by lots. If a master with a $20,000 account is regularly winning or losing $1,500 on single trades, they are risking 7–8% per trade — and their drawdown figure will confirm it. If the typical trade is $100–200, they are trading at about 1%. Thirty seconds of arithmetic tells you more about a master's discipline than any description they write about themselves.
Pips are distance, lots are size, margin is the deposit. Pips × pip value × lots = dollars at risk. That is the only formula a copier needs.
This article is education, not investment advice. Trading and copy trading in leveraged instruments carry a high risk of losing the funds you allocate. Read the Risk Disclosure.