Your share count comes from your 1R, not the stock
Short · Risk & sizing · October 8, 2026
Olympia publishes educational content for learning purposes only. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Nothing here is investment advice.
Take the dollars you're willing to lose and divide them by the distance to your stop. That's your share count. Tighten the stop and the count goes up, and the amount at risk never moves. You never pick the size — you pick the loss.
The lesson in writing
Here's where the size comes from. And it isn't how much you like the stock — that shouldn't matter at all.
What it is
Your share count is an answer, not a choice. You never pick the size. You pick the loss, and the arithmetic tells you the size.
How it's worked out
Take the dollars you're willing to lose and divide them by the distance to your stop. That becomes your share count.
Two hundred and fifty dollars at risk, five dollars from your purchase price to your stop. Divide that and you end up with fifty shares.
Now say you tighten the stop to two dollars fifty a share. Same thing — a hundred shares, the same two hundred and fifty dollars at risk. The stop moved the size; it never moved the loss.
Where Olympia calculates it
Olympia does that division in the shares line and shows you its working: fifty, because two hundred and fifty at risk divided by five dollars a share.
Change the stop and the share count changes with it, in front of you — which is the whole point of letting the arithmetic hold the pen.
Example numbers, not a member's: $250 at risk, in at $100 with the stop at $95 (and at $97.50), in Olympia's I'm In window. Arithmetic on those inputs, not a forecast.
