When building a futures trading system one of the most crucial aspects is how it will determine its position sizing. Specifically, how it will determine how many contracts to trade once it gets a buy or sell signal.

One of the best ways to do position sizing is through a formula designed to "normalize" the markets for volatility. This way, a market with high volatility trades much more cautiously than a market with low volatility. In other words, the high-volatility market trades with fewer contracts than a low-volatility market.

The next consideration is how much of the account to risk for each trade. As a rule of thumb, it is best to risk no more than about 1% to 3% of the account size for each trade. So, a $100,000 account should never risk more than about $1,000 to $3,000 for each trade.

Once a trader has determined the risk for each trade and the market's volatility they can then calculate the contracts to trade with this formula: (account size * risk a trade / market volatility).

Another consideration is the risk for each sector. Traders should never risk more than about 5% of the account at one time in a given sector. So, the risk in highly correlated positions like crude oil, heating oil and gasoline should be summed together. It is this combined risk in a correlated sector that should not exceed about 5% of the account size. Violating this rule can cause traders to be too dependent on one sector and voids the benefits of diversification.

Besides risk for each trade and risk for each sector one should consider the total risk at any given time. This is the amount one would lose if every single trade they were in exited simultaneously at a loss. This amount should not exceed about 10%.

By managing risk, and carrying out position sizing this way, one can substantially cut the risk in trading. Finding trading software that can compute all these position sizing rules is extremely difficult. As far as we know there are only two software packages that can do this correctly. One is Mechanica and the other is Trading Blox.

This article directory limits us on the size of the article we can publish. So, traders wanting to learn more should visit DH Trading Systems website.

Commodity trading carries risks and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.