What account size do I need to trade gold with a bot?

The question is usually asked as if the account size were the variable and everything else fixed. It is the reverse. The minimum lot of 0.01 controls one troy ounce of gold, so a $1.00 move is worth exactly $1.00 — which means the dollar value of your stop is your minimum possible risk, whatever percentage you configured.

From there the arithmetic is one line. Required balance equals stop distance divided by risk percentage. A $10 stop at 1.5% risk needs about $667; the same stop at 1% needs $1,000. Tighten the stop to $5 and those become $333 and $500.

This is why any bot advertising a flat minimum balance without mentioning stop distance is giving you half an equation. Both levers move, and the lot size calculator shows the point at which the broker minimum silently overrides your risk setting.

The practical answer

Our software runs from $100. That is a real figure rather than a marketing one, and it comes with a real condition: at that balance the stop distance has to be tight enough that 0.01 lots stays inside a sane risk percentage, which constrains which setups are viable.

Around $700 the constraint stops binding for typical gold stop distances, and around $1,000 there is enough room that normal volatility does not force the choice. Those are not tiers of a product — they are where the arithmetic stops fighting you.

The other consideration is drawdown tolerance rather than mechanics. Our validated maximum drawdown is roughly 20%, so an account you cannot watch fall by a fifth without switching the system off is too small in a sense no calculator captures.