Risk & Dealing7 min read
What You Actually Pay a Broker: Spreads, Commissions, Markup and Swaps
The four ways brokers earn from a trade, how to read the numbers they advertise and how to compare total cost.
BridgexFX editorial · 2026-09-25
One broker advertises '0.0 pip spreads', the next 'zero commission' and a third 'no hidden fees'. All three can be telling the truth and still charge you quite different amounts for the same trade. That isn't an accident of marketing. It reflects a business with several revenue streams that interact. Here is how each one works and how to compare them fairly.
The spread
The spread is the gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at, and it is the cost most visible to traders. On EUR/USD a retail broker might quote a 1-pip spread, so you buy at 1.0851 and could sell straight away at 1.0850, starting every round trip one pip down. For scalpers and intraday traders that is usually the dominant cost.
What the headline doesn't show is whether it's typical or best-case, how it behaves around news and quiet hours, and where it comes from. Spreads widen when liquidity thins at market opens, news releases and holidays. A '0.1 pip' claim on majors is usually the tightest moment of the day on a raw feed. Ask for typical spreads across sessions.
Commission
ECN and raw-spread accounts charge a per-trade commission on top of, or in place of, spread markup, commonly quoted per lot per side and often around $3–$7 per lot round turn depending on broker and tier. The appeal is clarity: the raw market spread plus a known fee.
To compare a spread-only account with a commission account, convert both to all-in cost per trade, meaning typical spread plus commission in the same unit. High-volume traders often do better on commission, while for small occasional traders the difference may be noise. Account tiers exist partly for this reason. The price list itself sorts traders by volume into whichever model suits the broker.
Markup
Markup is the opaque one. A broker receiving liquidity at 0.1 pips may quote you 0.6 or 1.0 and keep the difference. That's not inherently wrong, since it is how most retail market-making works and the model is disclosed even if the number isn't. The difficulty is comparison: two brokers quoting '1 pip' can have very different underlying costs and execution quality.
This is where A-book and B-book touch pricing. A broker internalizing your flow doesn't pay spread to a liquidity provider on your trade, so its economics differ from an agency broker passing orders through. Neither is automatically better for you. The all-in cost and the quality of your fills matter, not the plumbing.
Swaps
Overnight financing, also called swap or rollover, is the cost traders forget until it matters. Holding a position past daily rollover incurs a charge, or sometimes a credit, based on interest-rate differentials plus the broker's own markup. On leveraged positions held for weeks, swaps can quietly exceed the entry spread.
Swap-free (Islamic) accounts, common in MENA, remove the overnight interest, but brokers rarely offer them as charity. The cost usually returns elsewhere as wider spreads, an admin fee after a set holding period or both. When comparing, look at total holding cost across your real average holding time, not at the 'no swaps' label.
A fair comparison
Set the marketing aside and compute all-in cost for your own pattern. Take your usual instrument, trade size, frequency and holding time, then add spread cost, commission and expected swaps using each broker's real numbers: typical spreads, the commission tier you would qualify for and published swap rates. A scalper and a swing trader can rank the same brokers in opposite orders.
Price is also only half of it. A slightly wider spread with dependable fills in news, no requotes and quick withdrawals beats a thin quote from a platform that freezes in volatility. The cheapest broker is the one with the lowest total cost of trading well.
The takeaway
Brokers earn from spreads, commissions, markup and swaps, and advertise the ones that look best. Compare all-in cost for your own pattern using typical figures, and weigh execution quality alongside price.
#Pricing#Trading costs#Swaps
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