Trading costs

Cost is the one part of trading you know in advance and can actually act on. Nobody can be sure which way price goes, but the amount each trade takes out of the account can be worked out before you click, and it repeats on every trade you ever place. This section gathers the articles that help you find that number for your own account instead of estimating it.

If you are starting out, read in this order: spread first and how to read it on the platform, then commission, then overnight financing — those three make up the cost of one trade. After that comes the article on adding them into a round-turn cost per lot, because that is the figure everything else gets compared against. Once you have your own number, the comparisons between account types and between brokers start to mean something, and a rebate falls into its proper place.

One idea runs through everything here: the figure on a marketing page is not usable in your spreadsheet. A published spread is usually an average, or a best case measured in good conditions, on an account type that may not be yours. What is usable is the number you measure on your own account, in the hours you actually trade — and several articles here show how to measure it.