How to compare two account types without fooling yourself
Comparing account types looks like a table exercise and it is not. The same two accounts can swap places depending on which pair you trade, what time you trade it, and whether you counted all three parts of the cost. Here is how to do it without arriving at a confident wrong answer.
The three parts, and why one alone is useless
Every comparison needs the same three components:
- Spread, which you pay on every trade
- Commission, which some account types charge per lot and others fold into the spread
- Rebate, which comes back afterwards
Look at only the first and a raw spread account wins every time, because that is the number it was designed to win on. Look at only the third and whichever account pays the biggest rebate wins, even if it was the most expensive place to trade.
The number that answers the question is what is left after all three: spread plus commission, minus rebate. Nothing shorter is a comparison.
Compare on the pair you actually trade
This is the trap that catches the most people, and it caught us too.
An account can look best on a table because of an instrument you will never touch. Gold, silver, oil and indices have completely different spread behaviour from major currency pairs, and an account that is cheap on one can be ordinary on another.
Pick the pair you actually trade, then compare. If you trade three pairs, do it three times. A single ranking across all instruments is a ranking of nothing in particular.
Compare at the time you actually trade
Spread is not one number. It widens outside the main sessions, around news, and at the daily rollover.
If you trade the London open, a comparison built from overnight figures is describing a market you are not in. Our [spread checker](/compare/spread) reads live from broker servers so you can look at the hours you care about instead of an average that includes hours you never see.
The commission trap
A raw spread account advertises a very tight spread and charges commission separately. A standard account advertises a wider spread and no commission.
Those two are not comparable until the commission is added in, and commission is quoted per lot per side on some brokers and per round turn on others. Read which one you are looking at before you add it, or you will be off by a factor of two.
Put it together
The [trading calculator](/tools/calculator) does the three-part arithmetic for a pair, an account type and a volume you enter, so the figure it prints is for your trading rather than for a headline.
Two habits make the result trustworthy:
- Enter your real monthly volume, not a round number that flatters the outcome
- Run it for each pair you trade rather than for the one with the best rate
Rates and spreads move. Any comparison you write down has a date attached to it, whether or not you wrote the date.
Next
- [Two ways a rebate is calculated, and why it changes the answer](/bai-viet/spread-share-vs-fixed-rebate)
- [Choosing an account type by how much you actually trade](/bai-viet/account-type-by-volume)