My Position Sizing Spreadsheet
The other day Marcos asked where he could find a position sizing spreadsheet. I just uploaded mine in case anybody else wanted a copy. It’s nothing fancy at all and it’s based on the percent risk position sizing model. Just enter your account equity and the amount you want to risk per trade (expressed as a percentage, so 1% would be entered as 0.01) on row 2.
The way I use it is I enter the tickers and stop loss amounts (in cents) in columns A and B. The number of shares to trade will appear in column C (rounded off to the nearest 25 shares). Another way, which is probably better would be to have ‘enter’ and ‘exit’ columns which would then compute the stop thus eliminating any human error in figuring out the stop (which I do once in a while).
Alternatively, you could just use the spreadsheet as a simple table, listing various stop amounts and the corresponding number of shares.
There are links to other, online, position sizing calculators in my position sizing post.



















This post has 3 comments
June 11th, 2006
Thanks for posting, Mike!
September 5th, 2006
Mike,
Thanks for opening my eyes to the R and position sizing. I never even realized its existance and how important it is. You always hear the word risk, but it’s always spoken of in a very subjective manner. You like to TradersCALM made me understand how quickly I set myself up for failure.
LP
September 6th, 2006
You’re welcome Lloyd. I find it interesting how some people really grasp the idea of R Multiples & expectancy while others just don’t get it at all. That’s the subject of an upcoming post…