As a newbie, you are at a learning stage so you should avoid taking risks and focus on building experience. Be conservative when it comes to leverage and maintain low levels, like 100:1. Moreover, to reduce your risks and protect, always use trailing stops.This way you’ll be able to manage the leverage properly.
I would say lower the better, one should use higher leverage only when confident of the market movements and patterns.
It is difficult to say what the best leverage for a newbie should be when all the traders are different and have their own trading requirements and skills. You better start with a low leverage ratio and increase it gradually as you gain experience.
%% LOWER leverage is better for sure, learning; why leverage ignorance?? I wonder we dont give 7 year old credit cards + bank loans?? Because we all start out ignorant in markets, like a 7 year old . But one advantage to using plenty of leverage when starting =plenty of drama/LOL
risk Management should certainly be a top priority to master when learning Forex, it is the key to survival and success!
Leverage for the beginner should be low so that they can practice and understanding the concept of the leverage, because of them think it means a good thing, when it is just both good and bad. Once you get hang of it, then you can increase the leverage.
In my opinion, an absolute newbie should stay away from using leverage in their trading. Leverage presupposes high risks. If you don't know how to trade properly, it is better for you to start with the no leverage trading. Surely, if you use leverage, then you have bigger potential profits, but your mistakes become more expensive as well. Instead of losing $0.5, you will lose something like $2 or it can be even more. So, a newbie can operate with the small trading budget but he still needs lots of practice. Imagine that you are ready to spend $100 on your practice. If you trade without any leverage, then you can make 100 deals or more in the worst case scenario, however, if you use leverage 1:5, then you will be able to do only 20 deals in the worst-case scenario. You should understand that it is not the absolute profit which matters on the early stages of trading. First of all, you need to learn how to make profits, and only after it can you aspire to make decent profits. If you want to do both, then you run high risks of losing your budget. So, concentrate on learning, rather than gaining profits if you are a newbie.
I think that the level of leverage that you choose should be as per your comfort zone. I think that you should use trailing stops, keep positions small, limit your capital amount for each position when you want to know the way to manage your leverage as a starter.