Fees Eat 36.7% of a 0.30% Target. Measure Yours

A taker round trip on Bybit costs 0.11%. If your strategy targets 0.30% per trade, the exchange takes 36.7% of the gross move before you count a single loss.

That ratio — round-trip cost divided by gross target — is the most useful single number a short-horizon trader can compute about their own system. It says what fraction of the edge is spoken for before the edge has to survive anything else.

The table

Gross target	Taker (0.11%)	Maker (0.04%)
0.10%	110.0%	40.0%
0.15%	73.3%	26.7%
0.20%	55.0%	20.0%
0.30%	36.7%	13.3%
0.50%	22.0%	8.0%
1.00%	11.0%	4.0%
2.00%	5.5%	2.0%

The top row is the important one. At a 0.10% target, taker fees exceed the entire move. There is no execution quality, no win rate and no risk management that rescues it, because the cost is larger than the prize. Strategies in that band are not marginal — they are arithmetically impossible on the standard schedule, and the only versions that work run on maker fills or a reduced effective rate.

Read it the other way round

The same table says something less obvious when you read down the columns: cost as a share of edge falls fast as targets widen, and the drop is steepest exactly in the range where most intraday systems live.

Moving a target from 0.20% to 0.30% cuts fee drag from 55% of gross edge to 36.7%. That is a larger improvement than most traders get from any amount of signal work, and it comes from one parameter change.

This is why the "more trades, smaller targets" instinct is expensive. Halving the target roughly doubles the trade count needed for the same gross return, and doubles the fee bill, while the fee share of each trade also doubles. The cost grows on two axes at once.

The other half: it applies to losers too

Fee drag on the target only describes the winning side. Losing trades pay the same 0.11%, which is why the break-even win rate moves further than the drag figure alone implies. With gross target T and round-trip fee F:

break-even p = (T + F) / (2T)

At T = 0.30% and F = 0.11%, break-even is 68.3%, against 50% fee-free. We work through that formula and where the common version of it goes wrong in the break-even win rate.

What actually moves the ratio

Only two terms in the fraction, so only two levers.

Raise the target. Costs nothing per trade and changes the strategy. Whether that is available depends on what the signal is actually detecting; a mean-reversion system tuned to microstructure cannot simply target three times as far.

Lower the round-trip cost. Three routes, in descending order of size:

Route	Round trip	Fee at 0.30% target
Taker both sides	0.110%	36.7%
Maker entry, taker exit	0.075%	25.0%
Maker both sides	0.040%	13.3%

Going maker on both legs takes fee drag from 36.7% to 13.3% — it removes roughly a third of the total cost of running the strategy. The price is fill certainty, which matters more on entries than exits, and is why the middle row is where a lot of systems actually land.

Beyond fill type, the rate itself. Exchange volume tiers require $250,000 on balance or $10,000,000 of 30-day futures volume at Bybit's VIP 1, which is out of reach for most accounts running these strategies. A rebate lowers the effective rate without a volume threshold — the mechanics are in what a trading rebate is, and current Bybit terms are on our Bybit page.

Do it on your own numbers

Take your median gross target from the last few hundred trades. Take your executed round-trip fee from the fee column of your trade history, not from the schedule. Divide — or let the fee calculator do it from your volume and taker share, including what a rebate moves it to.

Under 15% and fees are a line item. Over 30% and fees are your largest counterparty. Over 100% and the strategy has never had an edge, whatever the equity curve did while variance was on your side.