Six years investing, three years actively trading. Profitable overall across those three years, which is probably why I never questioned the one thing I was doing badly.
I had no method for position sizing. None I would find a setup I liked, decide “this feels like a 2 lakh trade,” buy it, and then place a stop loss wherever looked roughly right on the chart. Sometimes that stop was 3% away. Sometimes it was 9%. I never once connected those two decisions to each other.
I’d heard the “never risk more than 1% of your capital on a single trade” line a hundred times. I thought it meant don’t put more than 1% of your capital into any one stock. On my account that would have been a position of tens of thousands, which seemed absurd for swing trading, so I mentally filed it as advice for people with much bigger accounts and moved on.
**It does not mean that. It means the maximum you can LOSE on the trade is 1% of capital.**The position size is whatever follows from that.
Position size = (capital × 1%) ÷ (entry price − stop loss price)
That’s it.
The stop comes first.
The position size is derived from it.
I had the whole thing backwards for three years.
What this changed, immediately:
Stop distance now determines position size. A setup where my stop is 3% away gets a much bigger position than one where the stop is 8% away. Same rupee risk either way. Before, I was doing the opposite without realising it, taking my biggest positions in the widest-stop trades because those were usually the “exciting” ones I felt most confident about.
My worst trades were structurally worst, not unlucky. Looking back through my statements, my biggest losses weren’t bad setups. Several were normal losers on positions that were just far too large for how wide the stop was. Two trades in one quarter took roughly 5-6% off my entire trading capital each.
Under this rule those same two trades cost 1% each. Same entries, same exits, same being-wrong. Different arithmetic.
Risk-reward finally became calculable. Once you know your risk in rupees before entry, comparing it to a structural target is trivial. I now skip anything under 1:2. Previously I had no denominator so I never did the calculation at all.
The emotional part was the surprise. A capped loss is boring. It doesn’t ruin the week or push you into a revenge trade to make it back. The compounding damage from my oversized losses was never just the money. It was the two or three bad decisions that followed while I was rattled.
Doing rough arithmetic on my last three years, I think I’d be sitting on meaningfully more than I am, without changing a single entry or exit. The edge was always there. I was leaking it through sizing.
If you’re profitable but your equity curve has these sudden vertical drops in it, this is probably why. Your entries might be fine. Check whether your losses are all roughly the same size. If they’re not, you don’t have a sizing method, you have a habit.
I’ve been running it strictly for a short while now and it’s early, so I’m not going to claim a transformation off a small sample. But the mechanism is obvious enough that I don’t think I need a hundred trades to know it’s right.