Fees

The formula

When your order takes liquidity (it crosses the spread and fills against a resting order), you pay:

Here p is the price per contract in dollars, between 0 and 1. The result is rounded up to the next $0.0001, per fill. It is not rounded to the cent. On one contract near the edge of the range the difference is large: one contract at $0.987 costs $0.0009, where rounding to the cent would charge $0.01, eleven times as much.

Makers pay zero

When your resting order is the one that gets hit, you are the maker, and the fee is zero. The whole fee falls on whoever crosses the spread. That is why patience has a price you can measure: resting an order saves the taker fee, at the risk of never being filled.

It peaks at 50 cents

p × (1 − p) is largest at 0.50, where it equals 0.25. So a taker pays at most 1.75 cents a contract, at 50 cents, and far less near the ends. For 100 contracts:

The fee is symmetric: buying at 30 cents costs the same as buying at 70 cents, because the same p × (1 − p) applies.

What it takes from a winner

If you buy at p and win, you make 1 − p a contract. The fee is 0.07 × p × (1 − p), so it takes 7% × p of that profit. At 50 cents it takes 3.5% of what you win. At 90 cents it takes 6.3%. The closer a contract is to certain, the larger the share of a small win that goes to the fee.

One fee or two

Holding a contract to settlement costs one fee, paid when you bought it. Closing early by crossing the spread again pays a second taker fee on the way out. A round trip taken both ways at 50 cents needs 3.5 cents of edge before it breaks even.

Try it

The exchange publishes its fee schedule, and a series can carry a fee multiplier. Rate and rounding on this page match fills the exchange actually charged. Check the current schedule before relying on them.