Most traders treat costs as weather — something that happens to them. Profitable ones treat costs as terrain: mapped in advance, routed around, exploited where favorable. The difference is nothing more than a routine. Here's one you can adopt wholesale, built around the free tools on this site.
The daily open: five minutes
- Scan [live markets](/markets). Prices and 24h moves for the majors — thirty seconds of context on which sessions and assets are moving before any chart-reading.
- Check the [funding board](/funding-rates). Three questions: is anything paying extreme rates (crowding signal + potential arbitrage)? What's the carry on positions I hold? What's the carry on trades I'm considering today?
- Review open positions against carry. A position paying 0.03%/8h costs ~3.3% of notional monthly. If a swing idea has stalled, funding is quietly deciding it for you — close it or accept the bleed consciously.
Before every entry: the ninety-second gate
A trade that can't survive ninety seconds of arithmetic doesn't deserve capital:
- Size it: stop distance + risk budget → notional, via the position size calculator.
- Price it: round-trip fees, breakeven price, and net PnL at target, via the fee calculator — which also flags whether another venue does the same trade cheaper.
- Carry it: if the intended hold exceeds a day, project funding in the funding calculator. A 2% edge with 1.5% of expected carry is a very different trade than it looked.
- Failsafe it: liquidation distance from the liquidation calculator — the stop must trigger long before the engine does.
Order type is part of the gate: is there urgency, or is this a maker-fee entry resting one tick below?
The weekly audit: twenty minutes
Once a week, export your fills and answer three questions:
- What did fees actually cost me? Sum them; divide by gross PnL. Above ~20–25% of gross for an active trader means execution or venue selection needs work.
- What was my maker/taker split? Every percentage point shifted toward maker is a direct rebate on the month; taker-heavy weeks should correspond to genuinely urgent trades, not habit.
- Am I on the right venues? Rerun your typical trade through the fee calculator comparison and the exchange table. Styles drift; a schedule that fit last quarter's swing trading punishes this quarter's scalping. Zero-fee and maker-friendly venues exist specifically for high-frequency styles.
The monthly reset: strategy-level hygiene
Recalculate your risk-per-trade dollar amount against the current account balance (fixed-fractional sizing decays if never updated). Re-verify fee schedules on your venues — exchanges change rates and run promos, and this site's data is estimates to be confirmed at the source. Archive the month's stats: cost ratio, maker split, funding paid vs received. Trends across months are where the real leaks show.
Why this works
None of these steps is clever. Their power is that they're unconditional — checklists run before conviction shows up to argue. Costs are the one part of trading with no uncertainty in it: fees, funding, and liquidation distances are computable in advance, every time. A routine that computes them converts free information into basis points — and basis points, compounded across a year of trades, are frequently the entire difference between a green year and a red one.