the beginners should not use the leverage for avoiding unfortunate risk and losses. but beginners always try to bring good amount of profit by using leverage.
high leverage could be more dangerous if there is no perfect money management , so traders should build a perfect money management first of all.
I thought this thread was about not using any leverage, but going by your screenshot you are using 1:10 leverage (your Position Value is 46,635 and your Margin Used 4,663). Now I am confused what it was that you were trying to show us?! As others have pointed out, the price movement in Forex is tiny. Without using leverage there is not a lot to gain unless you run a very busy intra-day strategy that tries to capture all the small moves throughout the day. However, trading costs will eat your profits then. If you have a profitable trading strategy, then take as much leverage as you can get. Leverage amplifies your profits for free! Obviously, it also amplifies your losses so better be sure you have a profitable strategy.
What about relationship between slippage and leverage that you use? Shouldn't a trader expect more slippage due to natural liquidity constraints especially in the times of high volatility?
Slippage eats up a bit of your profit in pips. An entry and exit 20 pips apart, at 2.5 pips slippage each gives you 15 pips profit. So double the volume is double the profit in dollars, at the same amount of pips. The volumes of an average retail trader will not affect the amount of slippage. The market can easily absorb orders up to 50 lots. On a 1:500 leveraged account, you need 50x less capital than on a 1:10 leveraged account to make the same profit. In other words, if the capital you invest makes 15% per year with 1:10 leverage, you could make 750% per year with 1:500 leverage using the same amount of money. However, your drawdowns will also be 50x bigger!! So in reality, you would want to backtest your strategy, run a Monte Carlo test and scale your volume such that it meets your risk appetite. Personally, I like to scale my strategies to maximum 35% equity drawdown at the 98th percentile. In other words, in 98% of all the random simulations the drawdown would be 35% or less. Having more than 35% drawdown would be very exceptional. Of course: "Past Performance Is No Guarantee of Future Results" and all that... With that scaling you will notice most strategies usually only need between 1:30 and 1:50 leverage to meet your brokers margin requirements. However, if you use 1:500 leverage, you can now run 10 different (=uncorrelated) strategies at the same time on the same account!! Just adding them up is mathematically not entirely accurate, so you better run a Monte Carlo on the portfolio to find the optimal individual weights. You will notice you can probably squeeze in a bit more than 10 strategies now. Running a portfolio of uncorrelated strategies gives a smoother equity curve, therefore allowing you to run even more strategies in parallel than you could have if you would have run the strategies on separate accounts each with a part of your capital. So it is worthwhile to try to run as much strategies as possible together on the same account. And for that, you benefit when the leverage is as high as possible.
Maybe I can contact Oanda and have them re-write the software to let me trade lower than current minimum of 10:1 leverage? Either way, total account value is still 1:1, so risk is still zero leverage regardless of a discrepancy in fees/ commission.
To settle the score, this account was traded/ re-balanced daily for 64 days. End result was A.P.Y. +11.6% Max DD -0.5%