What Is a Lot in Forex? Standard, Mini and Micro

A lot is the unit in which trade size is measured. One standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency of the pair, a mini lot is 10,000 and a micro lot is 1,000, so a position of 0.10 lots on EUR/USD controls 10,000 euro. Every volume figure on a track record — and almost every cost a broker charges — is denominated in lots.

How it works

The lot is a multiplier applied to a contract size that the broker defines per symbol.

Units traded = Lots × Contract size

Standard lot   1.00  = 100,000 units
Mini lot       0.10  =  10,000 units
Micro lot      0.01  =   1,000 units

Contract size is what converts a price movement into money. One pip is 0.0001 on a five-digit forex pair and 0.01 on a yen pair, so the value of a pip follows directly:

Pip value = Lots × Contract size × pip size, converted into account currency
          = 1.00 × 100,000 × 0.0001 = $10 per pip on EUR/USD

The 100,000 figure is a forex convention, not a rule. Gold, indices, energies and crypto CFDs each carry their own contract size, set by the broker and visible in the symbol specification, so "one lot" on XAUUSD is not "one lot" on EUR/USD. On a cent account the account currency is scaled instead, which shrinks the effective size of the same nominal lot again.

Why it matters

Lots are the unit brokers bill in. Commission is quoted per lot, per side or round turn. Swap is quoted per lot, per night. Spread cost is the spread in pips multiplied by the pip value, which is itself a function of contract size. Nothing in that list scales with the number of trades — it all scales with volume.

That makes total volume the denominator that makes two accounts comparable: cost in dollars says nothing on its own, because a large account trading big size should pay more. Cost per lot divides the account size out, and it is the only form in which one broker's charges can be held against another's.

Volume is also the one number a trader chooses outright. Win rate, drawdown and profit factor are outcomes; lot size is an instruction, given before the market has any say, which is why a volume column read on its own reveals position sizing discipline faster than any performance metric.

What the data shows

The figures below describe accounts published on ShowMyTrades, not traders in general. The public accounts here have traded 1,724,575 lots (August 2026) — roughly 770 lots per published account with history — across 703 distinct broker servers.

The cost side of that volume comes to $4,782,670 in commissions and $862,547 in swap on the trades synchronised here, with 86.3% of accounts that pay any swap net negative on it. Resist dividing one by the other for a headline rate: the totals cover different populations, and the mix underneath contains symbols with unequal contract sizes, brokers quoting per side against round turn, and spread-only accounts paying no commission at all. Cost per lot is the right comparison — it is simply one to run on a single account, where both numbers come from the same trades.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

Total Lots sits in the Trades column of Advanced Statistics, shown to two decimals, directly above Total Commissions and Total Swap Paid. All three are sums over the account's closed buy and sell trades, calculated on our servers, with deposits and withdrawals excluded. Both cost rows keep the sign the broker recorded, so commission normally reads as a negative number and swap turns red when the account paid more than it earned. Reading the three rows together gives the cost-per-lot arithmetic above for one account, on real broker records rather than a published price list.

Per trade, the Volume column in Trade History & Balance Progression carries the size of every ticket, to two decimals. Account owners can remove it from public pages and widgets with the Lots toggle in the account's privacy settings, so a public account page without a volume column is a deliberate choice rather than missing data.

The Duration view in the same Advanced Statistics panel encodes volume as bubble size — over the most recent 200 closed trades — which is where an escalating lot progression becomes visible as growing circles rather than a column of numbers.

To size a position before placing it, the position size calculator takes account balance, risk and stop distance and returns the lot size, with the contract size selectable as Micro Lot (1,000), Mini Lot (10,000) or Standard Lot (100,000).

Common misunderstandings

• "0.01 lots is a small position." Relative to what. A micro lot on EUR/USD risks about $0.10 per pip; on a $200 account with a 50-pip stop that is 2.5% of equity.
• "Total Lots shows the size I trade." It is a sum. The same total can come from ten thousand micro trades or one hundred standard ones — the trade table is where the distribution lives.
• "More volume means a better trader." Volume measures activity and cost. It carries no information about whether any of it was profitable.

For reading a volume column as a risk fingerprint, see the trading volume analysis guide.

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