Gold EA costs per lot: spread, commission and swap

A gold EA pays the spread and any commission on every lot it trades, plus swap on positions held overnight, and the Strategy Tester charges spread and swap but can leave commission at zero.

• On a 100-ounce XAUUSD contract quoted to two decimals, one point is $0.01 of price and $1 per lot. Read your broker’s Specification before you rely on that.
• The Strategy Tester already charges the spread in its history and the swap in the symbol’s specification. Commission is the one it can leave at zero.
• The number to take from any report is net profit per lot traded: it shows how much extra cost the result could carry.

Most pages about gold trading costs answer in pips, and they disagree about what a pip on gold is. MetaTrader 5 does not use pips. It counts in points, and everything a cost is made of can be read off the symbol itself. This guide turns spread, commission and swap into dollars per lot on XAUUSD, says which of them the Strategy Tester already charges, and shows how to add the one it may not.

Points, lots and dollars on XAUUSD

Open Market Watch, right-click the symbol and choose Specification. MetaQuotes lists what it shows, including “Spread — spread in points”, “Contract size — number of units of the commodity, currency or financial asset in one lot”, “Tick size — minimum price change step” and “Tick value — cost of a single price change point” (MetaTrader 5 Help).

On XAUUSD a lot is usually 100 troy ounces and the quote usually has two decimals, so one point is $0.01 of price and $1 per lot. The conversion, as arithmetic rather than a broker quote:

• a 20-point spread is $0.20 of price, or $20 per lot for each round trip;
• on a three-decimal quote the point is $0.001, so the same $0.20 spread reads as 200 points.

Our lot size calculator takes the same two fields, contract size and point size. A symbol with a suffix can carry a different specification from the plain one, so read the one you will trade.

Spread: already in the tester’s result

You pay the spread by buying at the ask and selling at the bid, and the tester does the same. MetaQuotes: “During testing, the spread is not modeled but is taken from historical data. If the historical spread is less than or equal to zero, then the last known (at the moment of generation) spread is used” (MetaTrader 5 Help).

So the net profit in a report is already after the spread the history recorded. It is not after a wider spread than that: another broker’s, another account type’s, or a busy minute that generated ticks flattened to one value. The tester’s documentation describes no field for typing a wider spread in. To see what one would cost, multiply by hand: lots traded × extra points × the value of a point per lot.

Commission: the one the tester can leave out

Brokers charge commission per lot or per deal, and whether the tester charges it depends on what it is told. On the IC Markets demo feed the desk tested, the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester charged $0 commission on XAUUSD, against roughly $7 per lot round-turn in real trading on that account. Why a gold EA backtest differs from live trading works that gap through on two of our runs.

The tester can charge it. Its trade settings include a commission table: “Commission can be charged per lot or deal”, “calculated in money, percentage or points”, and charged “depending on deal direction: entry, exit or both operation types” (MetaTrader 5 Help). Open the trade settings from the button beside Delays, go to Commissions, and add a row for your symbol as your broker charges it: for example per volume, in deposit currency, with half the round-turn on entry and half on exit. “The instant commission size is displayed in the Commission field of deals”, so the report’s deal list shows whether it took.

Our own published figures were produced without that setting, which is why each one carries the commission departure beside it.

Swap: charged, on the broker’s terms

Swap is the financing charge or credit on a position held through the daily rollover. The tester works it out unless you choose profit in pips, the one shortcut where “Swap and commission calculations are eliminated” (MetaTrader 5 Help), and it appears in the Swap column of the report’s deals.

What it costs depends on three parts of the Specification. Swap type sets the unit: points, a currency amount, or a percentage of price. Swap long and Swap short give the rates, and they need not match. Swap rates give a multiplier per weekday; in MetaQuotes’ own example one day carries a ratio of three, so a position rolled over that night pays three days at once (same Market Watch page). Which day that is on gold is the broker’s choice, so read it rather than assume it.

A position closed before the rollover pays none. One held for days pays every night, and a tester’s swap is only as current as the specification it ran with.

The number to take away: net per lot

Costs scale with volume, so the useful question of any report is how much each lot traded earned: divide the net profit by the lots. Two of our own runs, from the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester at a $25,000 deposit over 1 January to 7 September 2026:

• Dawnbreak: +$12,518.94 over 125.22 lots, about $100 per lot. Take off roughly $7 of commission and about $93 is left, so at $1 a point about 93 points of further cost on every lot would have used up the Strategy Tester net.
• Reclaim: +$17,222.66 over 8.81 lots, about $1,955 per lot.

Neither says anything about the future. They say how much extra cost each run could have absorbed, and that the answer differs nearly twenty-fold between two runs whose nets sit in the same range. Do the same division on any report before you compare two EAs.

Before you act on any of this

Every figure above comes from the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester on IC Markets demo data, never from live trading, and no result is promised anywhere on this site. The $7 commission is our own estimate, not a broker statement, and the point arithmetic assumes a 100-ounce, two-decimal contract. Read the risk disclosure before you attach anything to a funded account.