Spread is the tax you pay on every round-turn. For scalpers, it's the single biggest friction. Plug in your pair, lot, spread, and trade frequency — see what it costs monthly.
For a scalping EA doing 10 trades a day at 0.5 lots on a 10-point spread, the annual spread bill is over $1,000 per lot-equivalent — enough to turn a profitable strategy into a losing one. For H4+ swing EAs, spread is rounding noise. Know which regime you're in.
Add commission to the spread for apples-to-apples. ECN: 0.2 spread + $3.5 commission × 2 sides = $7 per round-turn on 1 lot ≈ 7 points total. Standard: 12 points. ECN wins by ~40% — and the gap widens on volatile pairs where standard spreads balloon.
1 pip = 10 points on a 5-digit broker (most modern brokers). So a 10-point spread on EURUSD is 1.0 pip.
It does if you used real tick data or configured the spread in Strategy Tester settings. Default backtests often use 'current spread' — which is misleading if you test on a weekend.