The fee curve nobody publishes
The commission is one percent everywhere. Measured against the profit a capped event can actually produce, trading at 80 cents costs sixteen times more than trading at 20.
The commission on an event contract evaluation is one percent, and the commission is charged on cost basis — what you actually pay for the shares, not what they would be worth at settlement. It is taken when you open. Closing costs nothing.
One percent, flat, everywhere. Which sounds like a cost you can ignore.
It is not, and the reason is that one percent of what you pay behaves very differently depending on where you are buying, once there is a ceiling on what any single event can return.
Two things interacting
Hold both of these in mind at once:
- Your cost scales with the contract price. Shares at 80 cents cost four times what the same number of shares cost at 20.
- Your profit does not. Each event is capped — half a percent of account size is the most any one event can contribute, no matter how you get there.
So as you move up the price range, you spend progressively more to reach the same fixed ceiling. The commission is a percentage of the spending, and the spending is the part that grows.
What that does to the number
Take a 50,000 account, where the per-event ceiling is $250. Here is what it costs to reach that ceiling from different entry prices, and what the commission works out to as a share of the profit you are allowed to keep from that event:
| Entry | Outlay to reach the $250 ceiling | Commission | As a share of the $250 | Across 20 events |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 cents | $62.50 | $0.62 | 0.25% | $12.50 |
| 35 cents | $134.62 | $1.35 | 0.54% | $26.92 |
| 50 cents | $250.00 | $2.50 | 1.00% | $50.00 |
| 65 cents | $464.29 | $4.64 | 1.86% | $92.86 |
| 80 cents | $1,000.00 | $10.00 | 4.00% | $200.00 |
Same one percent. Same $250 of headroom. Sixteen times the cost at the top of the range compared to the bottom.
The formula behind the table, if you want to carry it around:
commission as a share of capped profit = 1% × p ÷ (1 − p)
At 0.20 that is 0.25 percent. At 0.80 it is 4 percent. The curve is not linear and it turns upward sharply past about 65 cents.
Why this is not the argument it looks like
It would be easy to read the table as “always trade cheap contracts”. That is the wrong lesson and it will cost you more than the fee ever could.
A contract at 20 cents is at 20 cents because it resolves NO four times in five. Buying cheap contracts indiscriminately is not a cost strategy, it is a losing strategy with a low expense ratio. Cost efficiency is worthless if the underlying selection is bad.
The correct reading is narrower and more useful:
The fee is a real component of edge, and it is one you can measure before you enter. When you are weighing a contract at 78 against one at 45 and your probability work says both are mispriced by a similar margin, the cheaper one keeps meaningfully more of the result. That is a tiebreaker, not a thesis.
The expensive end needs a bigger edge to clear the same bar. A contract at 80 needs to be enough mispriced to cover four percent of your capped upside before it starts competing with the same edge at 50 cents. Sometimes it is. Often it is not, and nothing on the screen tells you.
The bit that compounds
Look at the last column again. Across twenty events on a 50,000 account, the difference between running at the bottom of the range and the top is $187.50 — against a target of $5,000.
Nearly four percent of the entire target, decided by nothing but where in the price range you tend to operate. It is not the biggest factor in whether an evaluation goes well. But it is the one that is fully knowable in advance, and almost nobody accounts for it.
Most published material on event contract funding does not mention this at all. Now you have the curve.
Evaluations are conducted on simulated accounts. Not financial advice.