ArdenAlgoThe cost of ignoring costs — why we only quote net
Here's an arithmetic fact that kills most retail strategies before breakfast: a round trip on a perpetual future costs real money — taker fees on entry and exit, slippage against you on fills, funding while you hold. Stack them and a "profitable" pattern that averages a small gross move per trade can be a reliable loser after costs.
Gross is a story; net is a result
Signal services quote gross moves because gross is generous: "the market moved 40 bps after our alert!" Whether a subscriber could have kept any of that after paying the toll is treated as the subscriber's problem. We think it's the only problem. Every figure on our ledger is shown gross and net, and every summary number we quote anywhere is net.
What our cost model includes
- Taker fees on both legs — paper fills assume crossing the spread like a market order would.
- Slippage — a modeled penalty on fills, because the touch price and your price are not the same thing.
- Funding — perpetuals charge or pay you for holding; a 48-hour-max holding window makes this material.
The model is reused from a sibling research project rather than invented fresh — one cost model, applied consistently, versioned like everything else.
The uncomfortable part
Costs are also why our early ledger looks harsh: the first closed trades lost more net than gross. That's not a bug in the display — it's the entire reason the display exists. If an edge can't survive its own costs in public, it isn't an edge, and we'd rather learn that on paper than have you learn it with money.