Comparison
Your sizing spreadsheet against ZRisk
A spreadsheet does the arithmetic correctly and knows nothing about the market. Where that stops being good enough, in specifics.
The short version
The spreadsheet is not wrong, it is just late. Every number in it was true when you typed it, and the two that matter most, the price and your fee tier, change without telling you.
| a spreadsheet | ZRisk | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Whatever you last pasted in | Streamed live from the exchange |
| Your fee tier | A number you looked up once | Read from your account, VIP level and all |
| Lot step and minimum | Not modelled, so the exchange rejects the order | Read per pair and applied automatically |
| Time per trade | Copy, paste, check, retype | The size is already correct on screen |
| Copy and paste mistakes | Yours to catch | Nothing is retyped, so there is nothing to mistype |
| What it costs | Nothing | A subscription, often less than the fees it saves |
| Where the history goes | Another sheet you maintain | Recorded per position, scored in R |
Everything in it was true when you typed it
A spreadsheet is a photograph. It is accurate about the moment it was taken and it does not age well: the price moved, the funding rate changed, your volume pushed you into a different fee tier three weeks ago and the sheet never noticed.
The mistake is not the formula, it is the transcription
Nobody gets risk over stop distance wrong. What goes wrong is a decimal place moved during a fast market, a stale entry price left in a cell, or a size that the exchange refuses because the pair trades in steps of 0.001. None of those are arithmetic errors, and none of them are caught by checking the formula again.
Keep the sheet if you like it
Plenty of good traders keep a journal in a spreadsheet and always will. The part worth moving is the part that has to be right in the ten seconds before an entry.
Questions
Yes. Every trade and its costs export to Excel, so a journal you already keep does not have to be abandoned.
No. The free calculator needs no account at all, and an account with no key connected still sizes trades. A key is only needed to place orders from ZRisk and to read your own fee tier.
Try it on your next trade
The free calculator needs no account. Size a trade with it and see whether the difference is real for you.