How much money
The deposit minimum is $5. The computed minimum is $1,000. The gap between those numbers is this page.
Facts checked on October 22, 2026
Forex is where the contradiction is widest. The brokers a beginner meets first advertise minimum deposits of $0–$10 — and their own legally-required warnings say most of their clients lose money. Both are true; they are answers to different questions. This page answers the beginner's actual question: at what capital does a micro-lot account stop fighting its owner?
Computed minimum viable capital for forex: $1,000 (risk term $300 · cost term $1,000 · about $20 a month of costs at beginner frequency). Survival floor: $75. A micro lot (0.01) on a major pair with a normal 30-pip stop risks about $3. To keep that risk at 1% of the account takes $300. But at 20 trades a month and about $1 of spread and slippage per round trip at retail micro size, costs run about $20 a month — and keeping costs under 2% of capital a month takes $1,000. The cost term wins, and it is the term nobody in the funnel mentions.
At $100 — the amount broker blogs call a plan — one normal trade risks 3% of the account and costs run near 20% of it a month at beginner frequency. A normal ten-loss streak costs about 30% of the account. The account does not usually die in one trade; it is taxed to death by its own cost stack while the trader is still learning. That is a mechanical outcome, and it is why the regulator figure for this product family is what it is: in Europe, 74–89% of retail CFD accounts lose money.
Leverage changes the margin you post, not the risk of the position. At the EU cap of 30:1 or the offshore 500:1, a 30-pip stop on a micro lot costs the same $3. What higher leverage changes is how large a position the platform will let you open — which is precisely the variable beginners should not be maximising in month one.
The '$100 forex plan' on a broker's blog ends, without exception, at that broker's account page. The plan is the deposit.
Run the checker with your numbers
The family · CheckBeforeDeposit
Before any deposit: which entity holds your money, and does your regulator warn? CheckBeforeDeposit computes your country × broker pair — the entity that would hold the account, your own regulator's warning status, and the minimum that is actually viable on your payment rails.
The verdict gives you the arithmetic for your market and your capital. The Start-or-Wait Kit gives you the complete workbook: the demo-record audit (the 50-trade review grid), the staged capital plan up to your market's minimum viable capital, the 90-day learning plan week by week, and the real-cost tracker — the spreadsheet experienced traders build by hand, ready to fill in.
Included in the $39 Start-or-Wait Kit
Sources: FINRA Regulatory Notice 26-10 (April 20, 2026) and the brokers' own pages for the PDT tracker; ESMA Decision (EU) 2018/796 and the AMF restatement for European CFD loss figures; ASIC Report 828 (FY2023–24) for Australia; CFTC retail forex materials for the United States; Barber, Lee, Liu & Odean (Taiwan market data) and Chague & De Losso (Brazil) for day-trading outcomes; the FPFX Technology dataset of 300,000+ prop-firm accounts, reported by Finance Magnates (2024); broker-published minimum deposits and margin schedules as dated on the dataset page. If a figure has moved since our check date, the issuer's own publication wins — and write to help@doogex.com so we can correct ours.