Commission
Commission — The per-trade fee an ECN or raw-spread account charges instead of widening the spread — a visible cost, recorded in your statement, and the only one that is.
Commission is the one trading cost that appears in your statement as its own number, which makes it the only one you can measure exactly. That visibility is also why it gets over-weighted: the costs that do not appear as a line are usually larger.
In plain English
Raw-spread and ECN accounts charge a commission per lot traded, typically quoted per side and per standard lot — "$3.50 per side" means about $7 for a round trip on one lot. Standard accounts charge nothing explicit and widen the spread instead. Neither is inherently cheaper; they are two ways of pricing the same service.
The comparison is simple arithmetic once both are in the same unit. A raw account at 0.1 pips of spread plus $7 round-trip commission costs roughly $8 per lot. A standard account at 1.0 pips of spread costs about $10 with no commission. The raw account is cheaper here — but only at this spread, and spreads widen at exactly the times you are most likely to be trading.
What makes commission worth attention is not its size but its interaction with your stop distance. A $7 cost against a $500 risk is 1.4% of the trade. The same $7 against a $50 risk is 14%, and that is a cost structure that can consume an entire edge without ever appearing to be the problem.
The formula
Round-trip commission = per-side rate × 2 × lots Cost in R = round-trip cost ÷ risk in money
- Per-side rate — quoted per standard lot. A 0.1-lot trade pays a tenth.
- Cost in R is the number that matters, because it is what shifts your break-even win rate.
Commission is charged on the full position size, not on the margin. Higher leverage does not make it cheaper.
Worked example — the demo account
The bundled demo account: 96 closed trades between 6 January 2025 and 9 April 2025.
| Total commission | −$329.04 | |
|---|---|---|
| Trades | 96 | |
| Average per trade | −$3.43 | 329.04 ÷ 96 |
| Net profit | +$4,293.45 | |
| Commission as a share of net profit | 7.7% |
About 8% of what the account kept went out as commission — visible, measurable, and already deducted from every figure on the dashboard.
Seven percent is a comfortable number. The useful exercise is the sensitivity: at double the commission this account still finishes clearly profitable, so its edge is not commission-dependent. A strategy where the same test flips the sign is a strategy whose real product is broker revenue.
The uncomfortable comparison is with the cost that is NOT in the file. Spread is paid on entry to every one of these 96 trades and appears nowhere as a line — it is already inside each trade’s open price. On a tight-stop strategy the invisible cost is routinely the larger of the two.
Every figure above is from the demo account TapeSheet ships with — 96 closed trades, generated from a fixed seed. Open the same account →
What this does not tell you
The caveat is the part worth reading. Most tools put it in a footer, if they print it at all.
- It is not your total cost of trading. Spread, swap and slippage are all real and only one of them has a column. A "zero commission" account is not a free account.
- Nothing about execution quality. A cheap commission with poor fills is more expensive than an expensive one with good fills, and the difference lives in slippage, which is unmeasurable from a statement.
- The per-side quote is half the number. Comparing a per-side rate against a competitor’s round-trip rate is a common and expensive error.
- Nothing about tiering. Many brokers reduce the rate above a monthly volume, so the headline figure may not be what you actually pay.
Where TapeSheet shows it
Totalled on the Overview as its own tile, and shown per trade in the detail drawer. It is deducted inside every trade’s net result, so profit factor, expectancy and win rate are all after-commission figures rather than gross ones.
Questions
Is a raw-spread account cheaper?
It depends on your stop distance and on when you trade. Raw accounts win for wide-stop, low-frequency trading where the commission is small against the risk. They lose for scalping tight stops, where a fixed per-lot charge is enormous relative to a small 1R. Convert both structures into cost-per-R on your own typical trade and the comparison stops being a matter of preference.
Why is commission negative in my statement?
Because it is money leaving the account, and MetaTrader writes it as a negative figure in the same row as the trade. TapeSheet keeps that sign, sums it as a cost, and includes it in each trade’s net — so a trade whose gross profit was smaller than its commission correctly shows as a loss.
Does commission count towards a prop-firm profit target?
It comes out of it. Prop targets are measured on net results, so commission reduces your progress towards the target in exactly the way it reduces your account. It is worth checking whether your firm’s stated target is gross or net; most are net, and the ones that are not are the ones to read carefully.
Related terms
See your own statement, analyzed
Drop an MT4 or MT5 statement on the page and the whole dashboard renders in about three seconds. No signup, no upload — the file is parsed inside your browser tab and never leaves your device.
Analyze my statementAll glossary terms ·Free trading journal ·MT4 statement analyzer ·MT5 report analyzer