Pip Value Calculator

A pip is the smallest price move a currency pair is conventionally quoted in: 0.0001 for most pairs, so EUR/USD going from 1.16590 to 1.16600 has moved one pip. The fifth decimal you see on a modern platform is a pipette, a tenth of a pip, and it exists because brokers wanted finer pricing than the convention allowed. Nothing about a pip is a law of nature; it is a unit everyone agreed on, so that two traders saying “a twenty-pip stop” mean the same thing.

The value of a pip is where it stops being a convention and starts being money, and it comes from one multiplication:

On a standard lot of 100,000 units, a pip of 0.0001 is worth 10 units of the quote currency. That is the whole calculation, and notice what it does not contain: the price. EUR/USD at 1.05 and EUR/USD at 1.25 both have a pip worth exactly 10 USD per standard lot. An exchange rate only enters when the quote currency is not the one your account is denominated in, and it enters at the end, as a conversion — never as part of the pip itself.

That is why the same trade is worth different amounts to different traders. A pip of GBP/USD is 10 USD to everybody; to a euro account it is about 8.61 EUR, and to a yen account about 1,545 JPY. The market has not changed. Only the ruler has.

Three consequences worth holding on to. First, a pip value is fixed in the quote currency for the life of the trade, but drifts in yours, because the conversion rate moves while you hold the position. Second, it scales exactly with size: half a lot is half the pip value, ten lots is ten times, with no rounding anywhere in between. Third, and most useful, pip value is the bridge between a stop in pips and a loss in money — a 20-pip stop at 10 USD a pip is 200 USD on a standard lot, which is the arithmetic the lot size calculator runs backwards to answer the question you usually care about: what size makes this stop cost exactly what I decided it may cost?

Yen pairs: the pip is 0.01, not 0.0001

Because a dollar buys a hundred-odd yen rather than one-point-something euro, the yen convention shifts the pip two decimal places: 0.01, with prices quoted to three decimals. One pip on a standard lot of USD/JPY is therefore 1,000 JPY, not 10 — and 1,000 JPY is about 6.47 USD. Treat a yen pair as though it had a 0.0001 pip and every risk figure you compute from it is wrong by a factor of a hundred. Every yen pair in the table above already carries the right unit, so you do not have to remember which is which.

Gold: points, and a factor of a hundred to watch for

Metals are not currency pairs and have no pips in the currency sense. This site quotes gold in points of 1.00: a move from 4,630.00 to 4,631.00 is one point, a standard lot is 100 ounces, and one point is therefore worth 100 USD per lot. That convention is used on every page here — volatility, signals, the lot size calculator — so the numbers agree wherever you look on this site.

Plenty of platforms use the other convention, calling a 0.01 move on gold one pip. Neither is wrong: they are the same price move under two rulers. But it means a terminal using that convention shows a pip value one hundred times smaller than the figure here — 1 USD per lot where we say 100. If your platform disagrees with this page on gold, that factor of a hundred is almost certainly the entire explanation, and you convert between the two by moving the decimal point two places. Silver is a different case and is not treated like gold here: it is measured in units of 0.001 on a 5,000-ounce lot, worth 5 USD per lot. That 0.001 is the price step most MetaTrader brokers quote, and it is what this page counts — but it is not what everyone calls a pip: IG and Admirals both define one silver pip as 0.01, which is ten of ours and 50 USD per lot. Either way, check what your own platform calls one unit before sizing anything on it.

Crypto: one lot is one coin

The crypto rows hold a contract of one — one lot is one coin, not a hundred thousand of anything — and value a move of 0.01 in the price. A “pip” there is a cent per coin, so the figures look tiny beside the currency rows for a reason that is arithmetic rather than significance. Two practical consequences: size in coins rather than lots, and think of a stop in price rather than in pips, because a 500-dollar move on bitcoin is 50,000 of these pips and that number tells you nothing useful.

Your account currency is the last multiplication, not the first

Work out the pip value in the instrument’s own quote currency first — that number is exact and needs no rate — then convert once, at the end. Doing it the other way round, converting the price before the multiplication, gives a number that is usually close, occasionally wrong, and impossible to check afterwards. The step list in the calculator is deliberately in that order, and it names the quote it used so you can redo the last line yourself.

Only the final step of this page uses a price at all, and it uses it as a conversion rate, not as a market level. Nothing here is a quote to trade on, and this page never claims to tell you what anything is worth at this instant in the way a chart does. Right now: From the ten-minute conversion feed, updated 15 minutes ago.

• A ten-minute conversion feed, when it is current. The page prints how old it is next to the answer, measured from the moment the source last refreshed rather than the moment we fetched it — a stamp on our own copy would keep looking fresh even if the feed behind it had stopped.
• The market analysis file, when that feed is more than half an hour stale or unreachable. It is labelled with its own capture time, and it carries the eight major currencies only, so instruments quoted in anything else cannot be converted from it. The page says so and shows a dash rather than reaching for a substitute.
• Your own rate, whenever you want it — tick “use my own rate” — and automatically when we have none. Your broker converts at its own rate anyway, usually with a spread on top, so if you want the figure your statement will show, this is the field to use.

One number here is immune to all of that: the pip value in the instrument’s own quote currency. It is pip size times contract size, it involves no price at all, and it is exact whether our feeds are healthy, stale or entirely absent. If you ever doubt the converted figure, that is the column to trust and convert by hand.

On precision: rates are shown to six significant figures and money is rounded for display, so redoing a line by hand can differ in the last decimal. The order of operations is the one printed — multiply, then convert — and it is the same shared code the lot size calculator runs, so the two pages cannot drift apart on the arithmetic itself.

• Lot size calculator — the natural next step. Pip value answers “what does a pip cost me?”; the lot size calculator turns it around and answers “how big may this trade be?”, given a stop and the money you are willing to lose on it.
• Where to place a stop loss in forex — you need a stop distance before either calculator is any use, and where it belongs is a decision about structure and volatility, not about arithmetic.
• Volatility analysis — how far each market actually travels, in its own unit. Multiply an ATR by the pip value from this page and you have a typical day’s move in money.
• Pivot point calculator — levels from the previous candle, with the same posture as this page: arithmetic you can check, and no forecast attached to it.