intradayforex.com
A glossary and a reality check for anyone thinking about day-trading currencies. Written to be understood, not to sell you a dream.
European and UK regulators require brokers to publish the percentage of retail accounts that lose money. Go read a few broker homepages — the disclosure is right there in the footer, in small print, by law: at most major brokers it says roughly 70–80% of retail accounts lose money trading these products.
That's the brokers' own number, in normal markets, about their own customers. Read it twice before you fund an account — then read the glossary so you at least know what the game is.
The vocabulary
Everything below is descriptive, not advice. It's the vocabulary you need to read anything else about forex without getting lost.
The standard unit of price movement — 0.0001 for most pairs (EUR/USD moving 1.0850 → 1.0851 is one pip).
P&L math starts here: pips moved × value per pip × lots.
The trade size unit. Standard = 100,000 units of currency; mini = 10,000; micro = 1,000.
On one standard lot of EUR/USD, a pip is about $10. Size decides whether a bad hour is a bruise or a wipeout.
Trading with borrowed exposure — 30:1 means $1,000 of margin controls $30,000 of currency.
It multiplies losses exactly as cheerfully as gains. Leverage is why small moves end accounts.
The collateral you post to hold a leveraged position.
It's not a fee — it's your money standing in front of the loss.
When losses eat your collateral, the broker demands more — and past a threshold, force-closes your positions.
The market doesn't wait for your paycheck. Stop-outs happen mid-move, at the worst price of your week.
The gap between buy and sell price — the built-in cost of every trade.
Every position opens slightly underwater. Scalpers pay it dozens of times a day.
Getting filled at a worse price than you clicked, common in fast or thin markets.
Your stop-loss at 1.0800 can fill at 1.0787 during a news spike. The plan and the fill are different things.
Long = betting the first currency in the pair rises; short = betting it falls.
Every pair is two economies arm-wrestling. You're picking the winner and the loser at once.
A standing order that closes your trade at a chosen loss level.
The difference between a bad trade and a bad year. Traded without one, "temporarily wrong" becomes "permanently broke."
A standing order that closes your trade at a chosen profit level.
Decided while you're calm, so hour-three greed doesn't get a vote.
Potential loss vs. potential gain on a trade — risking 20 pips to make 40 is 1:2.
At 1:2 you can be wrong more often than right and still break even. The ratio, not the win rate, is the story.
Choosing how much to risk per trade, as a fraction of your account.
The only variable fully under your control. Most blown accounts are sizing failures wearing a strategy costume.
The distance from your account's peak to its trough.
A 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain just to get back to even. Losses are geometrically rude.
Very short trades — seconds to minutes — chasing a few pips each.
High stress, high frequency, and the spread taxes every single round trip.
Intraday: positions closed the same day. Swing: held for days or weeks.
Intraday means no overnight surprises — and also no time for a thesis to breathe.
The heavily traded dollar pairs — EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, USD/CHF.
Tightest spreads, deepest liquidity. Exotic pairs charge admission both ways.
How much can be bought or sold without moving the price.
Deep liquidity = clean fills. Thin liquidity = slippage and gaps, usually when you least want them.
How much and how fast price moves. In forex it follows the clock — the London/New York overlap is the busy shift.
Volatility is opportunity and risk in the same wrapper; news releases are its espresso.
Holding a pair to collect the interest-rate difference between the two currencies.
Earns quietly for months, then a sharp reversal can hand it all back in an afternoon.
A written record of every trade: the setup, the reason, the exit, the mood.
The cheapest edge in the entire business, which is exactly why almost nobody keeps one.
The reality check
Not advice — just the sequence that separates "I tried forex" from "I lit my savings on fire in a weekend."
A demo account costs nothing and grades honestly. If the demo isn't profitable, the live account will simply be faster.
The old-school discipline is ~1% of the account per trade. The number matters less than having one you never negotiate with mid-trade.
Setup, reason, exit, emotion. Patterns you can't see in the moment are obvious on paper two weeks later.
The 70–80% isn't about other, dumber people. It's the base rate, and you start inside it.
If losing it would change your month, it's not risk capital — it's rent with extra steps.