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Your spread is not the signal's spread: cost sensitivity

A signal's profit already paid its own spread. Copy it and you pay yours on top. A strategy that keeps a few pips a trade has little room for that.

· 3 min read · numbers from engine 2026-10-23

Every trade pays to get in and out. The spread is the gap between the buy and the sell price; slippage is the difference between the price you asked for and the price you got; some accounts add a commission per lot. A signal’s history already contains the costs of the account it traded on. Its profit is what was left after them.

Copy that signal, and your trades do not run on that account. They run on yours, with your broker’s spread and your commission. And a copied trade opens a moment after the original, at whatever price the market offers by then. If your costs are higher than the provider’s, the difference comes out of every trade.

The number that decides it: pips kept per trade

A pip is the smallest usual price step of a currency pair: 0.0001 for most pairs. Divide what a strategy made by the trades it took, in pips, and you get the pips it keeps per trade after its own costs. That number is the extra spread the strategy can survive. Pay one pip more than the provider on every trade, and a strategy that keeps one pip a trade earns nothing.

We ran three anonymized live signals that trade only currency pairs through the engine’s cost model, charging them 0.5, 1, 2 and 3 extra pips on every trade.

signal A: kept per trade, on average
16.4 pips
signal B: kept per trade
5.8 pips
signal C: kept per trade
2.9 pips
The fewer pips a trade keeps, the faster extra costs eat the profit. Three extra pips left signal A with 77% of its profit and signal C with 1%.Engine 2026-10-23 cost model (C1, C3), one extra pip priced per symbol at its typical price; three anonymized live signal histories from our fixtures.

Signal A kept 16.4 pips a trade. Three extra pips cost it 617 of its 2,669 profit. Signal C kept 2.9 pips a trade, and traded more often, about 40 times a month. The same three pips left it 22 of 2,281.

The break-even point is easy to read off. Signal C’s profit was gone at 3.0 pips of extra spread per trade; signal B’s at 5.2 pips; signal A’s at 13.0 pips.

Try it with your own costs

Set the pips a trade keeps on the provider’s account, and the spread you pay on top of theirs. The calculator starts from signal C: 2.9 pips a trade, about 40 trades a month, 0.07 lots per trade, and one extra pip.

Cost per trade
0.7
Cost per month
28
Net per month after costs
+53.2
Extra spread that wipes out the edge
1.9 pips
92.438.27−15.87−70
Spread 0 pips5 pips
What an extra spread does to a strategy's monthly result. Here the pips are what a trade keeps after the provider's own costs, so the spread is only what you pay beyond theirs.Model: src/islands/spread-cost.ts, the same cost per trade as the engine (C1). The value of a pip differs by pair and account currency; set your own.

What we cannot show

What the arithmetic does show is where to look. A strategy that keeps 16.4 pips a trade can absorb a worse account. One that keeps 2.9 pips cannot, and no backtest run on a raw-spread account will tell you so.

What to do with your own report

  1. Find the pips a trade keeps after costs. Monetio shows it per symbol as the break-even extra spread, on the Costs screen.
  2. Compare it with the extra spread of the account you would copy to, and allow for slippage from the copy delay. If what is left is small, so is your profit.
  3. Check when the strategy trades. Trades clustered around the rollover hour pay the widest spreads of the day.
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