Trade rarely, size small, keep the rules simple. Small accounts usually don't die from bad ideas — they die from fees and oversized positions. On a $200 account, a busy bot can burn roughly 10% a month in fees alone before the strategy earns anything. The setup that survives is the slow, boring one.
Why do small accounts blow up so often?
Two quiet killers: trading costs that are fixed as a percentage but huge relative to a small balance, and position sizes that turn one bad streak into a wipeout. Every trade costs a fee, and every fee is a slice of your account that must be won back before you see profit — a busy strategy pays that toll dozens of times a month. Oversizing is the second killer: betting half the account per trade means three or four losses in a row — a completely normal streak for any strategy — can cut the account nearly in half or worse. Neither problem is about picking wrong. Both are about arithmetic that punishes small balances harder than large ones.
How much do fees actually eat on a $200 account?
Enough to sink a good strategy, if it trades often. Work it through with typical assumptions: a 0.06% fee per trade means a round trip — one buy plus one sell — costs 0.12%. If the bot uses the full $200 each time, that's $0.24 per round trip. Sounds tiny. Now trade three times a day: 90 round trips a month is about $21.60 in fees — roughly 10.8% of the whole account, every month, just to break even. Slow the same bot down to one trade a week and the monthly toll drops to about $1 — around 0.5%. Same account, same fee rate; the only variable that changed is how often the bot trades.
How big should each position be?
Small enough that a losing streak is an annoyance, not an ending — a common guideline is risking 1–2% of the account per trade. Risk here means what you lose if the trade hits its stop-loss (a preset exit that caps the damage), not the full position size. On $200, a 2% risk cap means each losing trade costs at most $4. That feels frustratingly slow, which is exactly the point: at $4 per loss, even ten straight losers — rare but possible — leaves you with $160 and a strategy you can still fix. The small account's real job isn't fast growth; it's staying alive long enough for you to learn what works.
What kind of strategy fits a small account?
A slow one — signals on daily or weekly prices, few trades, no leverage. The comparison makes itself:
| Fast setup (3 trades/day) | Slow setup (1 trade/week) | |
|---|---|---|
| Round trips per month | ~90 |
