What a round-turn lot really costs: spread, commission, swap

Three lines, one bill

A round turn is one complete trade — open plus close. Every round turn is billed up to three ways: the spread (the gap between buy and sell price, paid effectively on entry), the commission (a fixed fee per side, where the account type charges one), and the swap (overnight financing, per night held). Everything a broker earns from your trading arrives through one of these three lines — there is no fourth. Which is why it is worth knowing each one to the cent.

Line one: the spread

On a standard EURUSD lot, one pip is worth $10.00. A raw account passes you the interbank spread — 0.0–0.2 pips on majors in liquid hours, an average of about 0.1 pips on EURUSD — so the spread line costs about $1.00 per round turn.

On commission-free accounts, this line is where the fee hides: the broker widens the raw spread by roughly 0.8–1.0 pips and calls the account "no commission." That markup costs $8.00–$10.00 per lot on EURUSD — the full account-type arithmetic is worked out for IC Markets Raw vs Standard and Pepperstone Razor vs Standard. Two things move the spread line regardless of account: session (majors are tightest in London/New York overlap) and news (spreads jump for seconds around releases). You cannot negotiate this line; you can only choose an account that does not inflate it and hours that keep it tight.

Line two: the commission

The visible line. On MetaTrader raw accounts both our partners bill $3.50 per lot per side — $7.00 per round turn. It is fixed, printed on every trade confirmation, and completely predictable before you trade.

It is also the only line on the bill that is negotiable — not by you alone, but by pooled volume. Through the Forexnese IB the broker bills $7.00 → $5.50 at IC Markets and $7.00 → $6.00 on Pepperstone Razor, at the source, with spreads untouched. The mechanism — and why at-source beats cashback paid later — is in how forex rebates work.

Line three: the swap

Hold a position past the daily rollover (5pm New York) and you pay — or receive — swap: the interest-rate differential between the two currencies, plus the broker's financing margin. Three properties matter:

• It changes daily. Swap follows central-bank rates and market conditions, so we will not print a number here and pretend it holds — check yours in MT4/MT5 under right-click the symbol → Specification → Swap Long / Swap Short.
• It is direction-dependent, and sometimes positive. Long and short swaps differ on every pair; holding the higher-yielding currency can earn a nightly credit (the classic carry).
• Wednesday charges triple. Spot FX settles T+2, so the weekend financing is booked mid-week: most pairs charge three nights of swap on Wednesday night.

For scale: at an illustrative $5.00 per lot per night, a five-night hold adds $25 to the bill — nearly four times the discounted commission. Multi-day traders should read their swap line before their commission line; intraday traders can ignore it entirely, because flat by rollover means $0.00.

The same bill, three trading styles

Costs are fixed per lot, but profit targets are not — so the bill weighs completely differently depending on how you trade. Spread plus commission against the gross value of hitting the target:

Read the first row twice: a 5-pip scalper hands 16% of every winning trade to costs at public rates. For that style, the cost per lot is not an accounting detail — it is the biggest single opponent, bigger than any indicator setting. A swing trader barely feels the commission but pays swap the scalper never sees. Whether the saving is worth chasing at your volume is its own question — worked out here, account size by account size.

What you can and cannot control

• The raw spread — no. It is the market. You can only refuse to let an account type inflate it, and trade the hours when it is thin.
• The swap — mostly no. It follows central-bank rates. Direction choice and not holding overnight are the only levers.
• The commission — yes. It is the one line with a negotiated rate behind it, which is exactly why an at-source discount is the cleanest cost cut in trading: $1.50 per lot at IC Markets, $1.00 at Pepperstone, every lot, forever.

Costs are the only variable in trading you fully control. The rebate calculator turns your monthly volume into the exact yearly number the commission line is worth.