Here is a trade that goes perfectly according to plan and still loses money.

A trader moves R10,000 offshore, opens a 10x long on bitcoin, holds it for two weeks, and closes it at exactly the price they opened it. No stop hit, no liquidation, no mistake. Price ended where it began. They then bring the money home.

They are down roughly R727, or 7.3% of their capital, and if they were careless about the route, closer to R1,708, which is 17%.

Nothing went wrong. That is the whole point of this article. Trading has a running cost that applies whether you are right, wrong, or neither, and almost everyone measures the wrong part of it.

The seven line items

A round trip from rand to rand has seven separate charges. Most traders can name two.

Diagram of the seven costs on a round trip: the on-ramp from rand, the entry fee, spread and slippage, funding or borrow while held, the exit fee, the off-ramp back to rand, and the liquidation fee if the exit is not yours to choose
Seven tolls between rand and rand. The two people argue about are the smallest two.
  1. The on-ramp. Rand into an offshore account, priced hop by hop here. Between 1.5% and 8.4% of your capital depending on four clicks.
  2. The entry fee. A taker order on Bybit's perpetuals costs 0.0550% of position size at VIP 0, a maker order 0.0200%.
  3. Spread and slippage. What you actually fill at, versus what you saw. Invisible, real, and worse on thin books and in fast markets.
  4. Carry. Funding on a perpetual, or interest on a spot-margin borrow. On a multi-day hold this is usually the largest single line, and the two rails price it completely differently, which is its own article.
  5. The exit fee. Same rate as entry, on the way out.
  6. The off-ramp. Stablecoin back across the border, back into rand, out to your bank.
  7. The liquidation fee. Only if the exit is not yours to choose. VALR publishes 0.5% on liquidation orders, spot and perpetual alike. This is the line item that turns a bad day into a worse one.

The receipt, filled in

R10,000 of capital, 10x, so a R100,000 position. Held 14 days. Closed flat. Perpetual rail, funding at the calm baseline of 0.01% per 8 hours. Taker in, taker out. Fees read from published schedules on 10 August 2026.

Line Charged on Cost
On-ramp, deliberate route R10,000 capital ~R152
Entry fee, 0.0550% R100,000 position R55
Funding, 42 settlements at 0.01% R100,000 position R420
Exit fee, 0.0550% R100,000 position R55
Off-ramp back to rand ~R9,300 ~R45
Total ~R727
As a share of your R10,000 7.3%

Now run the same trade for someone who used the card, the convenience button, and the network they half remembered from a forum post:

Line Cost
On-ramp, convenient route ~R840
Entry and exit fees R110
Funding, unchanged R420
Off-ramp, convenience button and an expensive network ~R338
Total ~R1,708
As a share of your R10,000 17.1%

Same trade. Same market. Same outcome of nothing happening. A R981 difference, entirely from route selection.

The part that should reorganise your attention

Look at where the money went in the careful version:

  • Trading fees, the number quoted in every exchange comparison ever written: R110, 15% of the bill.
  • Funding, the running cost of the rail you chose: R420, 58% of the bill.
  • Getting money in and out: R197, 27% of the bill.

Traders will move venues over a 0.02% difference in taker fees and then pay 2% to a convenience button and 0.42% in funding without checking either. It is the same instinct that makes people drive across town to save R30 on petrol and then not read their bond rate.

Bar chart splitting the total cost of a flat two-week 10x round trip into trading fees at fifteen percent, funding at fifty-eight percent, and on-ramp plus off-ramp at twenty-seven percent
Where R727 actually went. The smallest slice is the one exchange comparisons are written about.

Three consequences follow, and none of them is a trading opinion:

Leverage multiplies the carry, not just the outcome. Funding and fees are charged on position size, your capital is what absorbs them. At 10x, a 0.42% cost to the position is a 4.2% cost to you. At 25x it is 10.5%. The liquidation distance shrinks at the same time. Leverage compresses your margin for error from both ends at once.

Holding period changes which costs matter. For a trade measured in hours, funding is one settlement and rounds to nothing, and the entry and exit fees dominate. Past a few days, carry swamps everything, and the rail you chose matters far more than the fee tier you are on.

The on-ramp is a fixed cost on a variable base. It is nearly the same rand amount whether you deploy it once or twenty times. Someone transferring R10,000, trading it for a year, and bringing it home has paid the ramp once. Someone shuttling money back and forth every fortnight has paid it twenty-six times.

The one cost that is not really a cost

The on-ramp article points out that the stablecoin price in rand carries a premium over the interbank rate, 1.26% on the day of writing. That is a genuine cost when you are moving money offshore one way.

On a round trip it is subtler, and worth stating precisely: you buy the stablecoin at a premium and you sell it back at a premium. If the premium is the same on both days, you get it back. If it has narrowed while you were offshore, you lose the difference; if it has widened, you gain.

So the local premium on a round trip is not a fee, it is a position. You are, without being told, short the rand premium for the duration of your trade. It is small, it is usually stable, and it is one more thing sitting quietly on the ledger next to the trade you thought you were making.

What the receipt does not include. Every number above assumes the exit is yours to choose. It is not, at 10x, if the price moves roughly 9.5% against you; a forced exit adds a liquidation fee to the top of this bill and removes the position at the worst available moment. Leveraged trading can lose more than your initial margin. Funding floats with sentiment and can run ten times the baseline used here. Fees change without notice. Education, not advice.

The four numbers to know before entry

Not "is this trade good." That is your call and nobody else's. These are just arithmetic:

  • What does the round trip cost me if the price never moves? Compute it before entry, as a percentage of your own capital, not the position.
  • What does one more day of holding cost? At the current funding or borrow rate, in rand.
  • How much of my cost is the ramp, and am I about to pay it again next week?
  • What is the equivalent bill on the other rail? Same trade, spot margin instead of perpetual, or the reverse. The gap is routinely a factor of three.

A trade has to clear its own bill before it makes you anything. Most traders have never once written the bill down, which means they have a return target in mind that starts several percent below where they think it does.

Education, not advice. All fees are from the venues' published schedules read on 10 August 2026 and change without notice. The worked examples are illustrations of the arithmetic, not projections and not recommendations. Crypto assets are high risk; leveraged trading can lose more than your initial margin. Nothing here recommends a position, a leverage level, a venue, or a holding period.