Commissions, exchange fees and data

After the roll and the financing, the explicit fees are the easy part - but they reward one habit: itemising.

The futures stack

A direct futures trade pays broker commission, an exchange fee, a small clearing fee, and usually a regulatory sliver - each itemised, each per contract. Add the standing costs: live exchange data is licensed per exchange per month, and serious platforms charge rent. None of it is large per contract. All of it is real, and because it is flat, it weighs most on the smallest accounts - the same commission is a far bigger fraction of a one-lot trader's expectancy than a fifty-lot desk's.

The CFD stack

Commodity CFDs are typically 'commission-free', and by now this module has taught you to hear that phrase correctly: the charge moved into the spread, where it scales with size and repetition instead of arriving as a line item. Data is usually free because the broker's own quote is the product. The stack did not shrink; it was folded in, which makes it smoother, less visible, and impossible to itemise from a statement.

The comparison habit

• Reduce every explicit fee to money per round turn at your size.
• Convert the spread to the same unit - module 3 lesson 2's arithmetic.
• Only then compare wrappers. A visible fee is not a larger fee; an invisible one is not a smaller one.