Fees & Slippage — Documentation

Trading Concepts

Two things make the dollar you see on a trade different from the dollar that hits your account: fees and slippage.

Fees

Your broker charges a small amount for opening and closing each contract. These charges are typically a few cents per contract per side and add up to a noticeable amount over a busy month.

You can choose how the portal shows them:

Show broker fees ON — every P&L number is shown net of fees, the way the money actually arrives in your account.
Show broker fees OFF — every P&L number is shown gross, before fees. Useful when you want to compare results to the original alert prices.

The toggle lives on the Dashboard Settings page. Switching it doesn't change anything about your trades — only the labels you read.

Note
The fee figure the portal shows is a close estimate built from your broker's published fee schedule. Your broker settles the exact amount after the close (it shows up on your statement), so a net number can move by a few cents once everything settles.

Note
Not every option costs the same to trade. Options on index products — like SPX or XSP — carry a small extra per-contract exchange fee that stock and ETF options don't, and they aren't discounted by the same per-trade commission cap. The portal accounts for this automatically per ticker, so an SPX or XSP trade shows slightly higher fees than a same-size SPY or QQQ trade.

The Include Broker Fees toggle on the Dashboard Settings page

Slippage

Slippage is the difference between the price the alert specified and the price your trade actually filled at. Markets move quickly; by the time your order reaches the exchange, prices may have moved a few cents.

Slippage can work for you or against you:

Negative slippage — you paid more on entry (or got less on exit) than the alert price. Most slippage is small negative.
Positive slippage — you got a better fill than the alert price. Rarer but it happens.

The portal tracks slippage automatically. Some dashboards include an Average Slippage card so you can see how your typical fills compare to the alert prices.

Example
An alert says "buy at $1.00." Your order fills at $1.02. That's -$0.02 of slippage per contract on entry. On 10 contracts, that's -$20 before the trade has done anything.

Tip
If your slippage is consistently large and negative, you may be trading during low-liquidity windows. Tightening your trading-hours filter is often the fix.