Commission

### What you are actually paying On a raw or ECN account the broker passes the market spread through to you and charges a flat fee per lot instead of burying its cut in the price. Pepperstone's Razor account is a public, checkable example: commission from $3.50 per lot, per side, with raw FX spreads from 0.0. *Per side* is the word that trips people. You are charged when you open and again when you close, so the figure that belongs in your maths is the round turn, roughly $7 per standard lot on that schedule. Pepperstone's Standard account, by contrast, charges no FX commission at all and instead applies a 1 pip mark up inside the spread. ### Put both accounts in one unit Stop comparing pips against dollars. Convert everything to cost per lot. On EUR/USD a standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency and one pip is worth about $10 (CMC Markets). - Standard account: 1 pip of markup is about $10 per lot, hidden inside the quoted price. - Raw account: about $7 per lot in commission, plus whatever the real spread happens to be at that moment. That arithmetic is why the commission model often nets cheaper at typical retail size. It is not automatic, though, and the honest caveat is the word *from*. Raw spreads start near zero, they do not live there. They widen off-hours, into data releases, and whenever liquidity thins out. The real comparison is your average executed spread plus commission, measured across the sessions you actually trade, against the standard account's all-in spread over the same window. ### The mistake Picking an account off the advertised spread. A "0.0" headline with a fee bolted on can be cheaper or more expensive than a wider quoted spread with no fee, and the only way to know is to add both components at your size, on your pairs, in your session. One more asymmetry worth internalising: commission scales with volume, not with time held. Swap punishes long holds. Commission punishes frequency. It lands hardest on small-target, high-turnover trading, where the round turn is a meaningful slice of the move you are aiming for in the first place.