Every broker makes money on your trades — the honest question is how, and how much. A plain-English tour of spreads, commissions, markup, and swaps, and how to compare pricing across brokers without being fooled.
BridgingFX editorial · 2026-09-25
Broker pricing pages are written to be compared and almost impossible to compare. One broker advertises '0.0 pip spreads', another 'zero commission', a third 'no hidden fees' — and all three can be telling the truth while charging you meaningfully different amounts for the same trade. Pricing confusion isn't an accident; it's the product of a business with several distinct revenue streams that interact in ways most traders never fully unpack. Here's the honest mechanics of how brokers actually get paid.
The spread — the gap between bid and ask — is the most visible cost in trading and the one brokers advertise most. On a liquid pair like EUR/USD, a retail broker might quote a 1-pip spread: you buy at 1.0851 and can instantly sell at 1.0850, so every round trip starts one pip underwater. Multiply by your position size and trade frequency and the spread becomes the dominant cost for most retail strategies, especially scalping and intraday trading.
What the headline spread doesn't tell you: whether it's typical or best-case, how it behaves during news and illiquid hours, and where it comes from. Spreads widen when liquidity thins — market opens, news releases, holidays. A broker advertising 0.1-pip spreads on majors is usually quoting the tightest moment of the day on its raw feed. Ask for typical spreads across sessions, not the marketing number.
ECN and raw-spread accounts replace (or supplement) spread markup with a per-trade commission — typically quoted per lot per side, something like $3–$7 per lot round turn depending on the broker and account tier. The appeal is transparency: you see the raw market spread plus a fixed fee, which makes costs predictable and comparable.
The honest comparison between a spread-only account and a commission account is all-in cost per trade: typical spread plus commission, converted to the same units. For high-volume traders the commission model usually wins; for small, infrequent traders the difference is often noise. Brokers know this, which is why account tiers exist — the pricing menu is itself a segmentation tool, sorting traders by volume into the model that's most profitable for the broker at each tier.
Markup is where pricing gets opaque. A broker receiving liquidity at a raw spread of 0.1 pips can add its own markup — quoting you 0.6 or 1.0 pips — and pocket the difference. There's nothing inherently wrong with this; it's how most retail market-making works and it's disclosed in the business model if not the number. The problem is comparability: two brokers quoting '1 pip spread' can have very different underlying costs and very different execution quality behind the quote.
This is also where the A-book/B-book distinction touches pricing. A broker internalising your flow (B-book) doesn't pay away spread to a liquidity provider on your trade, so its pricing economics differ entirely from an agency broker passing flow through. Neither model is automatically better for the trader — what matters is the all-in cost you pay and the quality of fills you get, not the plumbing behind them.
Overnight financing — swaps or rollover — is the cost traders forget until it isn't. Holding a position past the daily rollover incurs a charge (or occasionally a credit) derived from interest-rate differentials plus the broker's own markup on the financing rate. On leveraged positions held for weeks, swaps can quietly exceed the spread cost of entering the trade.
Swap-free (Islamic) accounts, widely offered in the MENA region, remove the overnight interest element — but brokers don't offer them as charity. The economics are typically recovered elsewhere: wider spreads on those accounts, administrative fees after a holding period, or both. If you're comparing a swap-free account against a standard one, compare total holding cost over your actual average holding period, not the headline 'no swaps' claim.
Forget the marketing. The comparison that matters is all-in cost for your trading pattern: take your typical instrument, your average trade size and frequency, and your average holding time, then compute spread cost plus commission plus expected swaps on each broker's real numbers — typical spreads, not minimums; actual commission tiers you'd qualify for; published swap rates. Two brokers can rank in opposite orders for a scalper versus a swing trader.
And price is only half the equation. A slightly wider spread with reliable execution during news, no requotes, and fast withdrawals beats a razor-thin quote from a broker whose platform freezes when volatility spikes. The cheapest broker is the one with the lowest total cost of trading well — fills, slippage, and downtime included. Anything less is just the cheapest advertisement.
Brokers earn through spreads, commissions, markup, and swaps — four streams that interact and are advertised selectively. Compare all-in cost for your own trading pattern using typical (not minimum) numbers, and weigh execution quality alongside price. The broker with the loudest '0.0 pips' banner is rarely the cheapest once every stream is counted.
Let's scope it — honestly, and in writing.
