Every hit rate you have ever seen advertised is gross. Costs come out of the winners and the losers alike, and against a 2% target they are large enough to change which side of break-even a record sits on.

What does a 2% target actually have to clear?

Its own costs, twice over. A round trip pays a fee going in and a fee coming out, crosses the spread at both ends, and pays funding for every eight hours in between. None of that appears in a channel's percentage.

Take the standard, non-VIP fee tier on the venues most signals point at, as of August 2026. Taker fees sit between 0.04% and 0.055% of notional per side, and maker fees at 0.02%. Enter and exit as a taker and the round trip costs 0.08% to 0.11% of the position, before anything else happens.

Against a 2% target, that is 4% to 5.5% of the entire move, gone before the trade has to be right about anything.

Why does the same cost hurt a small target more?

Because the cost is fixed to the position and the target is not. A 0.11% round trip against a 10% target takes 1.1% of it. The same round trip against a 2% target takes 5.5% of it.

This is the arithmetic that makes short-target signal following expensive as a category:

Target Round trip at 0.11% Share of the target consumed
10% 0.11% 1.1%
5% 0.11% 2.2%
2% 0.11% 5.5%
1% 0.11% 11.0%

A channel calling small, frequent moves is running a strategy whose costs scale with the number of trades while its edge scales with the size of each one. Nothing about that is dishonest. It is just a fact about the format that the advertised percentage does not carry.

Does leverage make the fees worse?

In money, yes. In proportion, no, and the difference matters more than it sounds.

Fees are charged on the notional size of the position. A target expressed as a percentage move is also a percentage of that same notional. So the share of the move that costs consume stays the same whatever leverage you use:

cost share of the target = round-trip cost / target size

At 20x, a 0.11% round trip is 2.2% of your margin, and a 2% target is 40% of your margin. Both got multiplied by twenty. The ratio between them is still 5.5%.

What leverage does change is how little room there is for anything to go wrong before the position is closed for you, which is a separate problem covered in Liquidation explained. For the cost question specifically, "use less leverage to pay less in fees" is only true in the sense that a smaller position pays smaller fees.

What does slippage add on top?

Roughly the spread, once, on each end, and on thin pairs it can be larger than the fee itself.

A market order crosses the spread by definition: you buy at the ask and sell at the bid. Published figures for BTC/USDT put the daily average spread around 0.04%, while low-liquidity and newly listed altcoins are quoted at 0.10% or more, and a 1% spread on a small cap is treated as a warning in its own right.

Size makes it worse in a way the spread number does not show. A market order larger than the top of the book walks down the price levels until it fills. The worked example in the source material has a 50 BTC market order filling at an average of $90,050 against a $90,000 top of book. That is 0.056% of extra cost, on a pair about as liquid as crypto gets, from size alone.

Put the two together for a round trip:

Pair type Fees Spread crossed Total Share of a 2% target
Major, tight book 0.11% 0.04% 0.15% 7.5%
Mid-cap altcoin 0.11% 0.10% 0.21% 10.5%
Thin small cap 0.11% 1.00% 1.11% 55.5%

The bottom row is the one worth sitting with. Where the spread is a full percent, the mechanics of getting in and out consume more than half of a 2% target. The trade then has to be right by a wide margin simply to return the money it started with.

Where do limit orders actually help?

They remove the spread and cut the fee, and they cost you the trades that never fill. It is a real saving with a real price attached.

Posting a limit order at the maker rate takes the round trip from 0.11% down to around 0.04%, and a resting order does not cross the spread. Against a 2% target that moves costs from 5.5% of the move to about 2%.

The price is selection. A limit order that never fills is a trade you did not take, and the trades that fail to fill are not a random sample: the entry that fills is disproportionately the one the price came back for. Our own replay makes the scale of this visible, as of August 2026: of 3,167 resolved outcomes, 1,554 were cancelled because the price ran to the target before the entry ever filled. Which order type to use, and what each one does to fill probability, is the subject of Order types for signal followers.

What does funding add for anything held overnight?

Three payments a day, every day the position stays open, in whichever direction the crowded side is paying.

Funding is exchanged every eight hours on perpetuals. A position held for two days pays or receives it six times. On a quiet pair with a small rate this is noise against a 2% target. On a crowded pair during a trend it is not, and it runs against the popular side by design, which is usually the side a signal has just put you on.

The full mechanics, including what the rate does to a trade waiting for a target, are in Funding rates explained.

How much does this change a channel's record?

Enough to move a record across break-even, which is the only threshold that matters.

Every figure our replay publishes is gross. It does not deduct fees, spread or funding, and the published corpus says so directly. Against the as-published replay, on the 1,514 outcomes that carry a profit-and-loss value as of August 2026:

Figure Gross
Share of outcomes in profit 31.4%
Average result on a winner +5.17%
Average result on a loser -4.73%
Win rate needed to break even 47.8%
Average result per outcome -0.65%

Costs come out of every outcome, winners and losers alike. Subtracting a round trip of 0.15% to 0.21% moves that average per outcome from -0.65% to roughly -0.80% or -0.86%, on the same denominator.

Two things about that arithmetic should be said plainly. It assumes every outcome pays a full round trip, which overstates costs for anything that never filled. And it treats the published percentage moves as being on the same base as the cost percentages, which they are. The direction is not in doubt even if the second decimal is: a record that is already below break-even before costs does not improve when they are added.

Why is "net of fees" a rule in regulated markets?

Because performance advertised gross has been understood as misleading for long enough to be written into the rulebooks that govern professional managers.

The relevant example is already documented in Why win rate alone means nothing: NFA Compliance Rule 2-29(b)(5) requires performance figures to be representative of all reasonably comparable accounts and net of all commissions, fees and expenses. A signal channel on a messaging app is under no such obligation, and almost none of them volunteer it.

That asymmetry is the practical point. When a regulated manager shows a return, the costs are already out of it. When a channel shows a hit rate, they are not, and the person paying them is you.

What can a follower actually do about this?

Reduce the number of round trips, or raise the size of the move each one is chasing. Those are the only two levers, and the second one is not usually yours to set.

In order of how much they move the number:

  1. Count your round trips per week. Costs scale with trade count. A follower taking every call from a high-frequency feed pays the round trip dozens of times a month, whatever the hit rate does.
  2. Check the target against the spread before entering. If the pair's spread is a meaningful fraction of the target, the trade is paying a large toll to chase a small move. This takes seconds on the order book.
  3. Use resting orders where the entry allows it, and accept that some calls will not fill. The unfilled ones cost nothing, which is easy to forget when watching one run to target without you.
  4. Treat any advertised percentage as gross. Ask what it becomes after a round trip at your fee tier, and whether the difference changes your answer.
  5. Do not solve a cost problem with leverage. It changes the money, not the proportion, and it shortens the distance to liquidation while it does so.

Sizing is the other half of this, and it interacts with costs directly, because a position too small to matter still pays a full round trip: Position sizing for signal followers.

What this does not prove

The fee rates above are standard-tier figures from published schedules as of August 2026, and they change. VIP tiers, token discounts and rebate programmes all lower them, sometimes substantially, and a reader on a discounted tier should redo the arithmetic with their own numbers rather than these.

The spread figures are orders of magnitude and are treated as such. No spread here is attributed to a specific pair on a specific date, because this run could reach search results but could not open the venue pages themselves, so nothing above rests on a primary source read directly.

The adjustment to the average result per outcome is an approximation with its assumptions stated, not a re-run of the replay with costs inside it. Doing that properly means rebuilding the replay, which is a job for the pipeline rather than for an article.

And none of this says a channel is bad. A record can survive its costs. The point is that you cannot tell from a number that never had them in it.

The practical read

A 2% target hands 4% to 5.5% of itself to fees before slippage, and 7.5% to 10.5% once a normal spread is crossed at both ends. On thin pairs it is far worse. The proportion does not change with leverage, so the fix is fewer round trips or larger moves, not a bigger position.

The number to carry away is the ratio, because it turns every advertised percentage into a question you can answer yourself: what does a round trip cost on this pair, and what fraction of this target is that? As of August 2026, against the corpus we can measure, that fraction is large enough to matter and it is never included in the figure being advertised.

What a channel's record looks like once you know what to check is at Signal Providers. Nothing here recommends any asset, any venue or any fee tier.

Sources