The smallest gold order at the MetaTrader brokers we checked is one troy ounce, about $4,300 of metal in September 2026. Sized the way you’d size EURUSD, it can risk several times your 1%.
- At RoboMarkets (Pro account, RoboMarkets Deutschland) and Eightcap one lot of XAUUSD is 100 troy ounces and the minimum order is 0.01, so a 0.01 position is one ounce and pays $1 for every $1 the price moves.
- Pepperstone lists the XAUUSD pip value at $0.10 per 0.01 lot, which on a 100-ounce contract would mean a $0.10 price step; RoboMarkets sets the pip size at 0.01, so there the same position pays $0.01 for each cent of price.
- Gold averaged $4,319 an ounce in September 2026 by World Bank data, so a 0.01 position held $4,319 of metal against $1,151 for 0.01 lot of EURUSD.
- In the 12 months to September 2026 gold’s average monthly move (the change between consecutive monthly average prices, averaged over 12 months) was worth $227 on a 0.01 position; on EURUSD it was $11.62.
A 0.01 position in gold pays $0.10 a pip at Pepperstone, the same as 0.01 lot of EURUSD, yet in the year to September 2026 an average month moved it by $227 and the euro trade by $11.62. XAUUSD pip value for 0.01 lot is $1 for each $1 change in the gold price, because a standard contract is 100 troy ounces at the MetaTrader brokers we checked and 0.01 of it is one ounce; how many “pips” that dollar contains depends on how your broker defines one. You’ve moved over from EURUSD, the order ticket says 0.01, the column next to it says $0.10, and it looks like the trade you already know.
It isn’t. The dime matches, but here it buys a ten-cent move on a $4,300 price, and an average month of the past year held 2,274 of those. Then there’s a second puzzle. A 0.01 position in the metal holds only 3.75 times as many dollars as 0.01 lot of EURUSD, yet it swung about 20 times as many dollars a month. Where does the rest come from?
What is the XAUUSD pip value for 0.01 lot?
It’s $0.10 if your broker counts a $0.10 price change as one pip, and $0.01 if it counts $0.01. In dollars per dollar of price it’s always $1, as long as the contract is 100 ounces.
Pepperstone publishes its figures in a pip value guide: XAUUSD at $10 per standard lot, $1 at 0.1 and $0.10 at 0.01. RoboMarkets Deutschland’s XAUUSD specification for its Pro account lists “1 Pip Size 0.01” and “Size of 1 lot 100 oz.” Pepperstone’s table doesn’t state the contract size; if it is 100 ounces too, its pip is a $0.10 move and the two definitions differ by a factor of ten. A trader who opened accounts at two brokers ran straight into it:
“On pepperstone for example it says on their website that a 1 pip move at 0.01 lots is equal to $0.10. But with my current broker (HFM) I traded XAUUSD and it came out to be $7.2 for a 720 pip move.”
Shiaav01, Babypips forum, 3 October 2024
The numbers are consistent with a $7.20 price move on a 100-ounce contract: 720 pips if each is $0.01, 72 if each is $0.10. Our position: on gold, stop counting in pips. Count the stop in dollars of price, because that number stays the same at every broker using 100-ounce contracts, and the number of pips doesn’t.
We took the World Bank’s monthly gold averages and the ECB’s daily euro rates, averaged by month, and measured the change from one monthly average to the next in dollars for a 0.01 position. Each point on the chart is the mean of those changes over the trailing 12 months:
In the year to December 2010 the euro still had the bigger swing: $40 a month on 0.01 lot of EURUSD against $35 on an ounce of gold. Over the following 15 years the two lines split. In December 2019 the euro was at $6.46 and gold at $32. Then the metal went to the highest monthly average in the World Bank series back to 1960, $5,020 in February 2026, and by August 2026 its average monthly move was $245 against the euro’s $12.
Did your last gold stop come from the chart, or from the number of pips you used to set on EURUSD?
How to calculate lot size for gold
Use the same risk formula as forex, but put the stop in dollars of price and the value of one standard contract per dollar, which is $100 at 100 ounces:
We took a EURUSD stop of 20 pips and measured it against the euro’s average monthly move in the year to September 2026, which was 116 pips: 20 pips is 17% of it. The same 17% of gold’s average month is $39 of price. So 20 pips on EURUSD and $39 on XAUUSD ask the same of the market. Here’s what they do to three accounts at 1% risk, rounding down to the 0.01 step and never below 0.01:
| Account | Trade | Formula says | You trade | Loss at stop | Real risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | EURUSD, 20 pips | 0.0250 | 0.02 | $4.00 | 0.80% |
| $500 | XAUUSD, $39 stop | 0.0013 | 0.01 | $39.00 | 7.80% |
| $2,000 | EURUSD, 20 pips | 0.1000 | 0.10 | $20.00 | 1.00% |
| $2,000 | XAUUSD, $39 stop | 0.0051 | 0.01 | $39.00 | 1.95% |
| $10,000 | EURUSD, 20 pips | 0.5000 | 0.50 | $100.00 | 1.00% |
| $10,000 | XAUUSD, $39 stop | 0.0256 | 0.02 | $78.00 | 0.78% |
Source: World Bank Pink Sheet (gold) and ECB reference rates (EURUSD), 12 months to September 2026; calculation by VipTools.
Look at the $500 row. The euro trade fits the rule with room to spare, and the smallest possible XAUUSD order takes 7.8% of the account on a single stop. That $39 is 390 pips at a broker that uses $0.10 and 3,900 at one that uses $0.01. You can run your own numbers in our lot size calculator and check what your broker’s definition does to it in the pip calculator.
Now the puzzle from the top. Contract size explains only part of the gap: a 0.01 position in the metal held $4,319 in September 2026, 3.75 times the $1,151 in 0.01 lot of EURUSD. The rest is volatility. Over the past year gold’s average monthly move was 5.27% of its price and the euro’s was 1.01%, five times smaller. Multiply 3.75 by that ratio and you get the 19.6 we measured for September 2026.
Where the formula trips you up on gold:
- The definition. If your platform’s pip is $0.01 and you type $0.10 from another broker’s table into a calculator, your size is ten times off in one direction or the other.
- The minimum. Below about $3,900 of balance, a 0.01 position with a $39 stop is already more than 1%, and the formula has nowhere lower to go.
- The averages. Both month figures come from changes between monthly average prices, so both understate a real month, and 20 pips or $39 is a smaller share of an actual month than 17%. Compare your stop with the high-to-low range inside the month, not with these averages.
- The contract. 100 ounces is common, not universal, so the $100 in the formula has to come from your own symbol’s specification.
What is 1 pip in XAUUSD?
It’s whatever price step your broker names a pip: $0.01 at RoboMarkets, $0.10 at Pepperstone if its contract is 100 ounces, and a full $1 on IG’s own CFD platform. On a 100-ounce contract, a $1 move still makes $1 on a 0.01 position whatever the step is called.
IG’s own CFD platform doesn’t sell the metal in 100-ounce lots. Its dealing details list a minimum size of 0.01, a contract size of USD 1, and “One Pip means 1 $/Troy Ounce”, so there a whole dollar of price counts as a single step and 0.01 of that contract earns one cent per dollar, not one dollar. Source: IG, Spot Gold market page, checked October 2026.
At the September average, a 1% move in the metal was $43.19 on one ounce, already 8.6% of a $500 account, against $11.51 for a 1% move in 0.01 lot of EURUSD. On the $500 row the trouble is the 0.01 minimum: with a $39 stop the smallest order can’t come down to 1%.
Have you checked which digit your own platform calls a pip on XAUUSD? It takes a minute:
- Open the symbol’s specification in MT4 or MT5 and read the contract size. If it’s 100, a 0.01 order is one ounce.
- Read the digits. Two digits after the point means a tick is $0.01; whether a pip is $0.01 or $0.10 is in the broker’s own spec page.
- Measure your stop in dollars of price, then put that figure into the lot size calculator, not a count of pips.
We couldn’t measure the high-to-low range inside each month for the metal. The free daily sources we tried, the London bullion market’s price feed, FRED and the Bundesbank, were blocked or returned no data, so the chart uses the World Bank’s monthly averages. On both markets the range inside a month is wider than the move between two monthly averages, so stops of $39 and 20 pips sit tighter against a real month than the 17% suggests.
What is the XAUUSD contract size?
At the MetaTrader brokers we checked it’s 100 troy ounces per standard lot. Eightcap’s commodities table lists XAUUSD with a contract size of 100 and a minimum volume of 0.01; RoboMarkets Deutschland lists “100 oz.” on its Pro account with a minimum of 0.01 and a step of 0.01. So 0.1 lot is 10 ounces and $10 per $1 of price, and 0.01 is one ounce and $1.
Back to the order ticket. That column still says $0.10. Next to it, write the dollar distance to your stop, because on a 0.01 gold position that’s the loss: $39 on the stop we used, and $227 in an average month of the past year.
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