Forex Signal Pips, Lot Size and Account Currency

Declare the quote convention

Record the currency pair, dealer product, price precision and the source of bid and ask. Do not assume the last decimal shown by a platform is one pip. Identify whether the provider publishes a mid-price idea or a dealer-side executable instruction. Different feed conventions can produce superficially different entries without proving which subscriber obtained a fill. A forex review should retain the original quoted level and its meaning, not replace it with a later convenient chart print.

Separate movement from position economics

A pip count describes price movement under a declared convention. It does not identify account profit without quantity, contract units, costs and conversion. Retain the dealer's definition of a lot and the account currency. Avoid a universal pip-value assertion for every pair or account. CFTC forex material establishes the need to inspect dealer and account risks; it does not supply current product terms. Those must be obtained from the exact regulated entity and offer you would use.

Worked example: explicitly declared fictional units

Invent a pair quoted in currency Q per unit of B, a pip step of 0.0001 Q and a position of 10,000 B. Under those assumptions, one pip represents 1 Q and a 15-pip favourable price change represents 15 Q before charges. If the account is in another currency, a separately specified conversion is needed. This is unit arithmetic, not a claim about any broker's lot or pip rules. Changing the assumed quantity changes the economics even while the provider continues reporting the same pip movement.

Compare a consistent cost basis

Identify spread, commission, financing and conversion separately. Ask whether the reported entry and exit already use bid or ask so the spread is not deducted twice. Charges can depend on product, account and holding interval; do not guess them to complete a provider table. A high gross pip total may come from many calls with small movements and substantial repeated costs. Publish missing fee inputs beside the figure rather than assigning a precise net result to an unobserved account.

Check response time and rollover

Keep publication, receipt, validity and dealer order response on a shared time record. A service can be inappropriate for your monitoring schedule even when its messages arrive reliably. Financing boundaries and market availability should be taken from the dealer's current terms, not inferred from the subscriber's local calendar. Identify every amendment to an existing instruction. A personal forex competition credential is background evidence; it cannot supply the live subscription's instrument coverage, cost model or historical delivery population.

Make the comparison reproducible

Save the pair specification, quantity convention, account currency and dated price sources. Distinguish provider-reported pips, your own worksheet calculation and actual broker records. Do not rank services by a mixture of those evidence classes without visible qualification. This chapter supplies no measured provider returns, account connection or paid trial. It helps a reader expose a basic but consequential error: adding impressive pip totals which do not share comparable size, costs, instruments or account-return meaning.

Decision record