The fees you actually pay
Trading costs are more than the headline commission. The main ones:
- Taker fee: charged when you remove liquidity with a market order (or a limit that fills immediately). Usually the higher fee.
- Maker fee: charged when you add liquidity with a resting limit order. Usually lower, sometimes zero or a rebate.
- Spread: the gap between best bid and ask — an implicit cost you pay on every round trip.
- Slippage: the difference between your expected price and the fill, worst on large orders or thin books.
- Funding: on perpetual futures, the recurring payment between longs and shorts (covered in our funding-rate guide).
Why fee drag compounds
A 0.05% taker fee sounds trivial. But round-trip it (entry plus exit) and you’re paying 0.1% per trade. Take ten trades a day and that’s 1% of turnover daily before you’ve made a single good decision.
For high-frequency or scalping styles, fees and spread can quietly exceed the edge. The fix isn’t to stop trading — it’s to measure the drag honestly and prefer maker orders, wider targets, or fewer, higher-quality trades.
Measuring fees against your returns
The number that matters is fees as a share of your profit, not of your account. If fees eat 30% of gross profit, cutting them — by using limit orders or trading less often — is as powerful as improving your win rate.
A trade journal that tracks fees per trade makes this visible. CoinCrypTick’s journal computes fee drag alongside win rate and risk-to-reward, so you can see exactly how much of your edge costs are consuming.