After studying more about cash management, I finally understand the threat of leverage. I ran through a demo account at 400:1 in no time (big surprise that there lol) and decreased it to 10:1 that I have managed to stay profitable but that's mostly been dumb luck. But I think even that leverage is high since I can't actually keep my risk to 1% per trade.

I guess to get a newbie maybe 2:1 leverage will be helpful? 1:1?

Will the leverage be altered after an account is available? Doesn't look like there's a means to do it with Metatrader using StrategyBuilderFX (demo), but I guess that would really be a change with the broker.