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The fee arithmetic that decides whether your strategy is viable
Fee math nobody runs before they start trading perps.
Assume a 0.06% taker fee and 0.02% maker fee — typical USDT-M defaults.
Round trip, taker in / taker out: 0.12% of notional. At 10x leverage that is 1.2% of your margin, per trade, before the market moves at all. Three trades a day, 20 trading days: 72% of margin paid in fees in a month.
Three things that change the number materially:
- Maker vs taker. Posting limit orders instead of crossing the spread cuts the round trip from
0.12% to 0.04% — a 3x reduction. Most retail flow is 100% taker out of impatience.
- VIP / volume tiers. Fee schedules step down with 30-day volume. Check where you actually sit;
most people are paying tier-0 rates on tier-2 volume because they never claimed it.
- Fee rebates. Affiliate and broker programs return part of the fee. This is disclosed below,
because it is exactly how this post is funded.
The unglamorous truth: cutting your fee rate improves expectancy by arithmetic, with no forecast required. Improving your entries requires being right about the future. Do the arithmetic one first.
Happy to be corrected on any of the arithmetic above.