Does this apply to shares as well as crypto?

The arithmetic is identical wherever there is a fee on the way in and a fee on the way out — shares, funds, foreign exchange, a house. Crypto simply makes it visible, because the percentage fees are large enough and the trading frequent enough for the compounding to show. On a fund bought once and held twenty years, the same structure hides inside the entry charge and matters far less than the ongoing one.

Where does tax fit in?

After this figure, and it moves the break-even further away. Tax applies to the gain, so it does not change the price at which you stop losing money — but it does change the price at which the trade was worth making. Treat this break-even as the floor and add whatever your jurisdiction takes from the gain to get the price at which the round trip actually paid.

A One-Per-Cent Fee on Each Side Is Not a Two-Per-Cent Problem

Published 9/21/2026 · 3 min read · Finance calculators

Camille Laurent — Finance writer at OneKitly

Tax · Personal finance

Checked against 2 sources

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In short

Buy at 100 with a 0.5 % fee and you have really spent 100.50. Sell at price P and you keep P × 0.995. Setting the two equal gives a break-even of 101.005 — a required gain of 1.005 %, not 1 %. The extra hundredth is the fee on the fee. Raise both sides to 1.5 % and the break-even is 103.046: the required gain goes up by a factor of 3.03 for a fee that went up by a factor of 3. The effect is small at these levels and it compounds savagely with frequency. Thirty round trips a year at 1.5 % a side means the position has to gain more than a hundred per cent across the year just to stand still — which is why fee schedules, not price forecasts, decide the outcome of active trading.

Buy and sell fees of 0.5 % each need a 1.005 % gain to break even. Triple them to 1.5 % and you need 3.046 % — more than triple, because the two fees multiply rather than add.

Why the two fees multiply

The buy fee raises the amount you have to recover; the sell fee is taken from whatever you recover, including the part that only exists to cover the buy fee. So you pay the sell fee on the buy fee. Written out, the break-even is the purchase price times one plus the buy fee, divided by one minus the sell fee — a product, not a sum. At small percentages the difference is a rounding error, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed until the fee or the frequency gets large.

The fees that do not appear as fees

The published rate is rarely the whole cost. The spread between what you can buy at and what you can sell at is a fee paid on every round trip whether or not anyone names it, and on a thin market it can dwarf the commission. Slippage on a large order does the same. A venue advertising zero commission has not removed the cost — it has moved it into the price, where the tool cannot see it. Enter the effective rate, spread included, and the break-even you get back is the one that matters.

Break-even price

Bought at 100: the price a sale has to reach
Fee each side	Break-even price	Gain needed
0.1 %	100.200	0.200 %
0.5 %	101.005	1.005 %
1.5 %	103.046	3.046 %

Worked with our own calculator

Break-even price calculator

Given

Buy price: $50.00
Buy fee (%): 0.05
Sell fee (%): 0.05

Result

Break-even sell price: $50.05
Minimum gain needed: 0.1%

These figures are produced by the calculator below, not typed in by hand — they are recomputed whenever the tool changes.

Run it on your own figures →

Frequently asked questions

Does this apply to shares as well as crypto?: The arithmetic is identical wherever there is a fee on the way in and a fee on the way out — shares, funds, foreign exchange, a house. Crypto simply makes it visible, because the percentage fees are large enough and the trading frequent enough for the compounding to show. On a fund bought once and held twenty years, the same structure hides inside the entry charge and matters far less than the ongoing one.
Where does tax fit in?: After this figure, and it moves the break-even further away. Tax applies to the gain, so it does not change the price at which you stop losing money — but it does change the price at which the trade was worth making. Treat this break-even as the floor and add whatever your jurisdiction takes from the gain to get the price at which the round trip actually paid.

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