This update focuses on improving the trading cost experience. Everyday trading does not require you to understand or manually adjust the underlying position multiplier. If you are interested in how the fee system has changed, read on.
TradingLife began with crypto-inspired fees charged as a percentage of traded value. This allowed costs to scale naturally with account size, and the game also adopted separate taker and maker rates.
When forex, futures, gold, and other instruments were added, their different price ranges presented a problem: applying crypto fee rates directly could make costs disproportionately high relative to the profit available in lower-volatility markets.
We therefore introduced base leverage—the multiplier previously shown beside instrument names. It adjusted position size behind the scenes, increasing the effect of smaller price moves on account gains and losses to make trading more comparable across instruments. It changed position size, not the market prices themselves.
Previously, base leverage was calculated in advance from an instrument’s long-term average one-minute range. But volatility is not evenly distributed over time: a long-term average cannot fully reflect both quiet and highly volatile periods.
Multipliers now use completed one-minute candles from the preceding 28 days:
We have also moved this mechanism further into the background. Position labels now show your manually selected leverage by default. To see the scaled value, enable Settings → Preferences → Show scaled leverage. This option changes only the display.
The previous fee benchmark used crypto-style rates of 0.05% / 0.02%. Even with position scaling, costs could still weigh too heavily on some trading situations.
After comparing trading costs with typical price ranges across instruments, we have changed the standard calibration target:
When a trade earns gross profit equivalent to a move of one average one-minute candle range, the combined entry and exit costs target approximately 20% of that gross profit.
This is a calibration target. Fees remain based on traded value; they are not a 20% deduction from each trade’s profit, and the actual percentage will vary between trades.
The new rules also remove separate taker and maker rates. Market and limit fills use the same fee rate, reducing the number of rules players need to learn.
Cost percentages in the interface represent a multiplier of standard cost: 100% means standard cost, and 200% means double cost.