The headline “commission-free” on a CFD account isn’t a lie — it’s a misdirection. The cost didn’t vanish; it moved somewhere you can’t see it as easily. To compare a CFD honestly against a future, you have to price all three costs, not just the one on the label.
The three real costs of any trade
Every round trip pays some mix of three things:
- Spread — the gap between bid and ask you cross to get filled.
- Commission — the explicit per-trade or per-contract fee.
- Slippage — the difference between the price you expected and the price you got, worst when liquidity is thin or news hits.
Only the second one shows up on an invoice. The first and third are where most of the real drag lives, and they’re precisely where the CFD and futures models diverge.
Where CFD costs come from
On a CFD, the provider quotes you a price and usually earns through a dealer-set spread — sometimes plus a commission on “raw-spread” account types. That spread is synthetic: it’s the provider’s price, derived from an underlying reference but ultimately theirs to set and to widen. Around news, or on less-liquid symbols, that widening is the cost, and it isn’t itemized.
This is worth stating fairly: for many traders CFDs are genuinely useful. They offer fractional sizing, low minimums, and access to markets — individual shares, some indices, baskets — that would be impractical to trade as full futures. That accessibility is real value. The trade-off is that the price you’re transacting against is the dealer’s construction, not a shared public book, so “the spread” is a number you have to trust rather than observe.
Where futures costs come from
On an exchange-traded future, the anatomy is inverted. You pay an explicit commission per contract to your broker, plus small exchange and clearing fees (and, separately, a market-data subscription). In exchange, the spread you cross is the real bid-ask of a central limit order book — the same book every participant trades against, visible in the depth-of-market (DOM). The tightest, most liquid contracts like ES routinely quote a one-tick spread you can watch tick by tick.
So the futures cost is more visible line-by-line, even if it looks like “more fees.” You’re trading a transparent, itemized cost against an opaque, bundled one.
| Cost component | CFD (OTC) | Futures (exchange) |
|---|---|---|
| Spread | Dealer-set, can widen | Real order-book bid/ask, public in the DOM |
| Commission | Often “zero” (built into spread) or raw-spread fee | Explicit per contract |
| Exchange / clearing fees | None (no exchange) | Small, itemized |
| Market data | Usually included | Separate CME/exchange subscription |
| Counterparty | Often the provider itself | Central clearing house — not your broker |
| Price transparency | One provider’s quote | Same public price for everyone |
The structural difference behind the cost
The last two rows are the ones serious traders weigh most. On many OTC CFDs the provider can be the counterparty to your trade — meaning your loss can be their gain, a structural conflict of interest to be aware of even where a firm hedges its book responsibly. On the exchange, the clearing house is the counterparty to everyone, your broker is not on the other side of your fill, and the price is the same public number for every participant.
None of this makes CFDs illegitimate. It makes the pricing less transparent and the oversight generally lighter than a cleared-futures venue. For a serious, funded futures trader, that transparency — a real DOM, a shared book, a counterparty that isn’t your broker — is a large part of the appeal, and it’s structural rather than a knock on any single firm.
Fold the real cost into your expectancy
Whatever you trade, the number that matters is cost after you subtract it from your edge. A strategy with a positive raw expectancy can go negative once realistic spread and slippage are baked in — so estimate them and put them in the math.
- Use the futures contract calculator to translate a tick or two of spread and a commission into dollars per round trip, per contract.
- Feed your real average win, loss and cost into the expectancy calculator and read why expectancy is the number that survives.
- Frame the result in R-multiples so cost is measured against the risk you took, not the raw dollars.
The honest version of this only works on your fills, not a broker’s marketing spread. Shibiki auto-journals every execution — entry, exit, slippage and fees — and reads the result back as live edge health, so you see the cost your system actually pays rather than the one the account page advertises.
Related: Futures contract calculator · Expectancy calculator · Trading expectancy