Commission

Broker pricing generally comes in two shapes: spread-only accounts with no explicit fee, and raw-spread accounts with tighter prices plus a fixed commission per lot. Neither is inherently better; the total round-trip cost is what matters.

For high-frequency or small-target strategies, commission structure can decide profitability by itself. Compute the all-in cost per trade — spread plus commission plus average slippage — before believing any strategy's numbers.

Covered in depth in Lesson 12: A-book, B-book: what your broker does with your order.

Related terms

Spread — The difference between the buy (ask) and sell (bid) price — the built-in cost of every round-trip trade.
Slippage — The difference between the price an order requested and the price it actually filled at.

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