Tick Value and Contract Size in MetaTrader

Every instrument in MetaTrader — currency pair, metal, index CFD, oil, crypto CFD — carries a specification: a sheet of properties the broker configures per symbol. Three of those properties do all the work of turning price moves into money:

Multiply them together and any price change on any instrument becomes account currency. The platform itself relies on exactly these properties when it shows the floating P/L of an open position — reading the specification is reading MetaTrader’s own conversion table.

The point is the smallest quoted digit, derived from how many decimals the symbol displays. The pipis a forex convention layered on top — ten points on a five-digit quote — and its money arithmetic is covered in the pip value guide. The tick size in the specification is a third, independent concept: the minimal price change the symbol can actually trade in, set explicitly by the broker.

Right-click any symbol in Market Watch and choose Specification. The dialog lists contract size alongside digits, volume limits and swap settings; tick size and tick value appear among the trading properties, though the exact field names vary slightly between brokers and platform builds. The same data is exposed to EAs and scripts:

Tick value is reported in the deposit currency, already converted at current rates. That makes it directly usable in risk maths — but it also means the figure drifts whenever the symbol’s profit currency differs from the account currency, so it is a live number, not a constant to memorise.

Forex habits — “a pip per standard lot is about ten dollars” — come from one specific configuration: contract size 100,000, pip 0.0001, USD quote currency. Step outside currency pairs and every part of that configuration changes:

• Gold (XAU/USD)typically trades in 100-ounce contracts ticking in $0.01 steps — an $8 move that looks tiny next to a four-digit price is 800 ticks.
• Index CFDsare quoted in index points, each worth a fixed currency amount per lot — there is no quote currency pair to reason from at all.
• Oil CFDs are priced per barrel with contract sizes commonly of 100 or 1,000 barrels, so the same $0.50 move differs tenfold in money between the two.
• Crypto CFDsoften use a contract size of one coin, so price moves map one-to-one into money per lot — a $500 swing is $500 per 1.00 lot.

With the three specification numbers in hand, risk no longer needs a per-asset-class recipe. Count how many ticks fit inside the stop distance, price each tick, scale by volume:

For forex pairs the formula collapses into the familiar pip-based sizing chain described in how position sizing works. The difference is that the tick version never assumed a pip exists — so it keeps working when the next symbol is not a currency pair. Run backwards, it sizes a position: lots = risk budget ÷ (ticks at risk × tick value).

Notice what failed here: forex intuition. An 8.50 stop “sounds like” a few pips, yet it is 850 ticks and $850 per lot. The same template handles an index: on the illustrative US500-style CFD above (tick size 0.1, tick value $0.10), a 36-point stop is 360 ticks × $0.10 = $36 per 1.00 lot. Different instruments, different magnitudes, one calculation.

The same arithmetic that prices a stop loss prices everything else: floating P/L, realised profit, the money meaning of any distance on any chart. An account that mixes two forex pairs with gold and an index cannot be normalised with a single constant — risk per trade, R-multiples and exposure comparisons are only correct if each trade is valued through its own symbol’s contract size and tick value.

That applies to tools as much as to platforms. The free MetaTrader Position Size Calculator runs the pip version of this chain for currency pairs; for anything else, the specification supplies the inputs the pip shortcut would otherwise hide. And when reviewing your own MetaTrader history, money P/L is already comparable across symbols precisely because the platform applied these conversions trade by trade — but turning that history into risk-normalised analysis means going back to the per-symbol specs. Reading them once per instrument is a small habit with a large payoff: every number in the account starts meaning the same thing.