Execution
Gold Spread vs Commission: How to Compare LP Offers
A commission per million is the price of a quiet day. One volatile session can cost a broker more in spread than a year of the commission it switched to save.
How to Compare the Gold Liquidity Offers Beyond the Commision
Commission is the one liquidity cost that arrives in writing, so it is the one brokers compare, and the bigger cost goes unnoticed.
Take a hypothetical broker that hedges $200 million of gold a month. Cutting its commission by $1 per million per side saves it about $4,800 a year. If gold spreads run 30 cents wider than normal through one session in which it hedges $80 million, that session costs about $5,700. One afternoon, and the year's saving is gone.
Only the saving appears in the price list. The cost of that session sits in the spread a broker pays while the market is moving. Passing it on to clients does not make it go away: either the wider spread eats into the broker’s markup, or clients get worse prices in the very session they trade most.
Spread and commission in the same unit
Put commission and spread in the same unit and the ranking flips. On $1 million of notional:
On $1m of gold, 30 cents of extra spread in one volatile session costs as much as seven round turns of commission.
Commission still counts, and at scale it counts. But currencies were just 13.7% of retail CFD volume in the second quarter of 2026, down from 26.8% a year earlier, and metals, mostly gold, were already more than 60% of broker CFD volume in the first half of 2025 (Finance Magnates Intelligence). At that weight, the bad sessions decide the year. A spread quoted "from" is the tightest the provider shows, usually for a split second on a calm day. What a broker actually pays is the average spread at the size it trades, measured across the volatile days as well as the quiet ones.
The spread that holds is what separates providers
Once the headline rates are close, the difference between two providers is how far each one's spread moves when the market does.
For our part: through the 2 October 2026 payrolls release, as gold moved about $40 in minutes, our average XAUUSD spread was 12.5 cents, within half a cent of the 12.2 cents we measured after July's Fed decision. The window-by-window figures are on our execution-data page.
The broker in the example could find its $4,800 saving on a rate card. The $5,700 was in the spread, and no rate card prints it.