Being able to calculate pips in your Forex trading is crucial to calculating your profit and loss. If you cannot correctly calculate how much a pip is worth, you cannot calculate your risk, and you also don’t know what you are paying in spreads to your broker.
In this post, we go through how to calculate pips in your trading and how you can use a pip counter indicator in MT4 and MT5.
NOTE: Want a full list of some of the best free MT4 and MT5 indicators you can use in your trading? You can get them below.
Table of Contents
How to Calculate Pips
Price movement in the Forex market is measured in pips. While some brokers quote their prices to the fifth decimal point, the fourth decimal point is known as a pip.
It is important you can calculate how much each pip is worth when making your Forex trades for two reasons;
#1: Working out your profit and loss.
#2: How much spread you are paying to your broker.
If you don’t know how much each pip is worth when you are making your trades, you will not know how much you risk. The same goes for how much profit you could stand to make.
On each trade, you will normally pay the spread mark-up to your broker for placing the trade. This spread will vary widely from broker to broker and for each currency pair. Whilst the major pairs will have the smallest spreads, the more exotic pairs will have far large spreads.
If you are making trades and not first correctly working out how much you are paying to your broker for the spread, then you could be entering a losing trade right from the start.
Using a Pip Size Calculator
It can be hard to track all of the different spreads over the many different Forex pairs. You also normally have to calculate exactly what the spread is manually. The other tricky thing is that the spreads are normally floating, meaning that they are constantly changing.
One of the easiest ways to track how big or small the spread is, is to use a pip counter indicator. With one of these indicators, you will instantly see on your charts exactly what the spread is in live time.
Pip Counter Indicator MT4 Free Download
This indicator at MQL5 shows you the exact spread for any given Forex pair in live time directly on your charts.
The other helpful feature this indicator comes with is that it also shows you a countdown to how long before the candle closes. For example, you will see how long before the daily candle closes or how long before the 1-hour candle closes.
With this MT4 indicator, you can adjust the following settings;
- Enable or disable the show profit setting
- Enable or disable to show the spread
- Enable or disable the candle time countdown
- Change the text color
- Change the font text
- Change the text font
- Choose what corner to see the indicator
Pip Counter Indicator MT5 Free Download
This is a super useful MT5 pip counter indicator from the same creator of the MT4 pip counter indicator.
With this indicator, you can see the exact amount of pips that the current spread is for any given Forex pair and how long until the candle closes.
With this MT5 indicator, you can adjust the following settings;
- Enable or disable the show profit setting
- Enable or disable to show the spread
- Enable or disable the candle time countdown
- Change the text color
- Change the font text
- Change the text font
- Choose what corner to see the indicator
You can get the free MT5 Pip Counter Indicator Here.
Note: Don’t know how to install and use these indicators? Read How to Download, Install and Use MT4 and MT5 Indicators.
Pip Profit Calculator
Pip Value Calculator
This is a very similar tool to the calculator discussed above.
With this pip value calculator, you enter some basic information such as your account currency, the pair you are trading, the ask price, and how large the trade is. The calculator will then tell you exactly how much each pip will be worth using your entered values.
You can use the free pip value calculator here
