Most people learn what a trade costs by watching an account come up short and not knowing why. It is simpler than that, and it is worth knowing before you place anything.
Figures as at 3 August 2026, from one broker. Costs differ between brokers and change over time. Nothing here is a quote — it is a worked example from real fills, shown so the arithmetic is visible.
The spread. The gap between the two prices quoted at any moment. You pay it the instant you enter, because you buy at the higher one and sell at the lower one.
The commission. A charge on the size of the position in dollars — not on the number of lots. So one lot of gold costs more when gold is expensive than when it is cheap, and one lot of a low-priced currency costs less than one lot of a high-priced one. It is charged on both sides of the trade — once when you enter and once when you exit — and every figure on this page is the complete round trip, both sides already added together. There is nothing further to double. It is not drawn on the chart at all; it comes straight out of the account.
⚠ Those two are held separately here, deliberately. The spread is measured in price; commission is proportional to what the position is worth. One combined number cannot track both, and anyone quoting you a single "cost per trade" is hiding one of them.
$6.00 for every $100,000 your position is worth — in and out, the whole round trip. That is the entire rule, and it is the same on every instrument.
Notice there are no pairs in that table. Commission does not have a per-pair figure — one lot is a different amount of money on every instrument, so the charge follows the money, not the lot.
Four actual fills. The sizes differ by more than a hundred times and the instruments are nothing like each other — read the last column.
Real fills from one broker — an IC Markets live account, 4 August 2025 to 26 June 2026 (212 positions, exported 3 August 2026). Size and commission only — nothing else from the account is shown.
Cost does not shrink when your stop does. A tighter stop means a smaller risk budget, and the same cost eats a larger share of it.
Put a number on it. Say the cost of a trade works out at 2 pips. On a 40-pip stop that is 5% of what you risked, gone before the trade has done anything. On a 10-pip stop the same 2 pips is 20%. Same cost, same trade, four times the damage — purely because the stop was tighter.
That is the whole reason a tight stop is not automatically a better stop. It is why the programme sets a minimum stop per instrument, and why a setup you are more confident in can afford a tighter one: it starts further above the floor.
And every trade in the programme is judged on what is left after costs, not on what the chart showed.
It is one of twelve in the Academy, all built the same way — each one explains something the dashboard actually does to you, so you can see why before you meet it.
Checkout is on Whop. Whop is not the dashboard — after joining you will get a separate email with your login link.
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