Dear builder with the 1-minute BTC scalper,
You asked why your strategy — the one with the 58% win rate and the beautiful equity curve — gets abandoned by our analyst every time you submit it. The answer is arithmetic, and since fee pages are written by marketing departments, let me lay out the version that decides things.
Every trade is two trades. You enter, you exit, and you pay the venue both times. What matters is the round trip: two taker fees if you're crossing the spread (and on a 1-minute strategy, you are), plus the spread itself, plus impact if you're big. Here is what the two-way commission alone costs, using the actual regular-tier schedules our engine charges:
| Venue | Maker | Taker | Round trip (taker) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Binance USD-M perps | 0.020% | 0.050% | 0.100% |
| Binance spot | 0.100% | 0.100% | 0.200% |
| Binance COIN-M inverse | 0.010% | 0.050% | 0.100% |
| Bybit linear perps | 0.020% | 0.055% | 0.110% |
| Hyperliquid | 0.015% | 0.045% | 0.090% |
| Deribit options | 0.030% | 0.030% | 0.060% + expiry rules |
| Binance options | 0.030% | 0.030% | 0.060% |
| US equities (commission-free broker) | $0 | $0 | spread + payment-for-order-flow pricing |
| Polymarket | $0 | $0 | spread only — and the spread is the product |
Now do the thing almost nobody does: divide your average winner by that number. Your scalper's average trade, the last time it came through our pipeline, made 0.04% of notional before costs. On Binance perps that's a 0.10% toll on a 0.04% edge. You're not running a strategy; you're running a donation with extra steps.
The floor we enforce
Our promotion gates require an average trade return above 0.15% of notional on futures venues (0.10% on the low-fee ones, 0.25% on spot, where the round trip is twice as expensive). Those numbers aren't taste. They're the two-way cost plus a margin for spread and slippage, and a strategy below them compounds to zero with excellent risk metrics the whole way down.
Three honest escapes
- Trade less often. The same signal on 4-hour bars instead of 1-minute bars divides your annual fee bill by roughly 240. Most "dead" scalps are viable swing trades.
- Make, don't take. Maker fees are 2-3x cheaper everywhere, and on some venues rebated. But be honest about fill rates: a limit order that doesn't fill on the move you predicted has an enormous invisible cost. Our engine fills passive orders against the real quote, and the fill-rate haircut usually eats half the fee savings.
- Move the edge, not the venue. Zero-commission venues aren't free; the cost migrates into the spread. A Polymarket book with a 2-cent spread on a 50-cent contract is a 4% round trip — forty times a Binance perp. "No fees" is where the arithmetic gets less honest, not more.
Rework the scalper on a slower clock and resubmit it. The signal was never the problem.
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