How much money
One question, answers from $0 to $50,000 — because every answer is a funnel. Here is the derived version.
Facts checked on October 22, 2026
Ask a broker and the answer is their minimum deposit: $5. Ask a broker's blog and it is $100, presented as a plan. Ask a prop firm and it is $500–$1,000, followed by a challenge. Ask a course and it is $2,000–$5,000. Ask an old video and it is $25,000, under a rule repealed in June 2026. The answers contradict each other by a factor of fifty inside the 'practical' range alone — and the pattern is not random error. Each number is calibrated to what the answerer sells.
A starting capital has to do two jobs. It must let one normal trade risk a small, survivable share of the account — the 1% rule every teacher teaches — and it must absorb trading's own costs without those costs eating the account. Minimum viable capital is the larger of those two requirements, computed per market from the size of one normal trade and the real cost of trading at small size. 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. Computed minimum viable capital for us stocks — day trading: $1,000 (risk term $300 · cost term $1,000 · about $20 a month of costs at beginner frequency). Survival floor: $75. Computed minimum viable capital for options: $2,000 (risk term $2,000 · cost term $2,000 · about $40 a month of costs at beginner frequency). Survival floor: $500. The full table, with every input declared and dated, is the minimum-capital dataset.
A broker minimum answers a different question: what will we accept? At XM's $5 minimum or Exness's $10, the first normal stop-loss is a large share of the account and the spread on the first trade is a measurable percentage of it. Nothing about that is hidden — the same firms print, where the law requires it, that 74–89% of retail accounts lose money. The deposit minimum and the loss statistic are both the firm's own numbers; the marketing just never places them on the same page. We do.
The honest answer is a sentence with your market in it: enough that one normal trade in that market risks 1% of your account, and your monthly costs stay under 2% of it. If your capital is below your market's computed minimum, the correct move is not a smaller ambition — it is a different sequence: demo with a journal at your real size, save toward the number, and re-run the verdict when you reach it. The checker at the top of this site does the whole computation from five answers.
Beware any single number offered without a market attached. 'You need $X to start trading' with no market, no stop distance and no cost stack is a deposit target wearing a lab coat.
Run the checker with your numbers
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.