Trading costs per month: your burn rate and how to bring it down
Work out your monthly trading burn rate: what trading really costs you each month, your runway, subscriptions billing while you don't trade, and how to cut it.
Startups track one number obsessively: their burn rate, how much cash leaves the business every month. Your trading is a tiny business too, and it has a burn rate whether you track it or not.
Your trading burn rate is the real money trading costs you each month: evaluations, resets, activation fees, data, platforms, courses and signals. A sample trader in our demo spent $9,953 on all of that over 28 months, about $355 a month on average. Knowing your own number tells you how long you can keep going, where the money leaks, and what to cut first.
Gross burn vs net burn
There are two versions of the number, and both are useful.
- Gross burn: every trading cost in a month, ignoring income. This is what you'd have to pay even in a month with no payouts.
- Net burn: gross burn minus real money in (payouts and realized personal trading profits), plus any realized personal trading losses. This is what trading actually takes out of your pocket.
The sample trader shows why you want both. Their gross burn has averaged about $355 a month. Their net result, all together, was -$10,184 over 28 months, roughly -$364 a month on average. But over the last 12 months their net was +$28, so net burn for the year is about zero, and over the last 3 months it turned positive at +$1,026. Gross burn tells you the cost of staying in the game. Net burn tells you whether the game is paying for itself yet.
Where a burn rate actually comes from
Averages hide the details, so break the number down. Here's where the sample trader's $9,953 went over 28 months, and what each category works out to per month:
| Category | Total | About per month |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluations | $5,125 | $183 |
| Courses, coaching and signals | $1,813 | $65 |
| Resets | $1,457 | $52 |
| Platforms | $869 | $31 |
| Activation fees | $437 | $16 |
| Market data | $252 | $9 |
Two things stand out. Evaluations and resets together are about two thirds of the burn, and resets alone cost more per month than platforms and data combined. And courses, coaching and signals, the category that never feels like a trading cost, is the second biggest line. When you look for cuts, start at the top of your own table, not with the $9 data feed.
How to calculate your monthly trading costs
- Pull your card statements and email receipts for the last 3 to 6 months.
- List every trading-related charge: firm fees, data, platforms, courses, coaching, signals.
- Add each month's total. That's your gross burn for each month.
- Subtract payouts received in that month, and add or subtract realized personal trading results. That's your net burn.
- Average the months. One month is noisy; three to six tell the truth.
Here's a hypothetical month for a trader with no payout yet:
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Two evaluations at $150 a month | $300 |
| One reset | $100 |
| Market data | $40 |
| Charting platform | $60 |
| Course membership | $50 |
| Signal group | $30 |
| Gross burn | $580 |
| Payouts | $0 |
| Net burn | $580 |
Commissions are usually already inside your trade results if your journal records fees, so don't add them twice. Just remember they're part of what trading costs.
Your runway: how long you can keep going
Runway is the money you've set aside for trading divided by your net burn. If the hypothetical trader above has a $3,000 trading budget and burns $580 a month, their runway is about 5 months.
The value of runway isn't the countdown. It's the decision you make in advance: when the runway ends, you stop, review your numbers and decide calmly what comes next, instead of refilling the budget in a frustrated moment. Your runway should only ever come from money you can afford to lose, never from rent, bills or savings you need. A good habit is to review at the halfway point too. If half the runway is gone, ask what has changed in your trading since you started: are accounts lasting longer, are rule breaks getting rarer? If nothing has changed, the second half will likely look like the first, and that's worth knowing before you spend it.
Decide what trading is allowed to cost you before the month starts, not after the next blown account.
The subscriptions that bill in months you barely trade
Here's the insight most traders miss: your monthly costs barely change with how much you trade, but your cost per trading day changes a lot.
| Month | Trading days | Gross burn | Cost per trading day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Busy month | 20 | $580 | $29 |
| Normal month | 12 | $580 | $48 |
| Vacation month | 3 | $580 | $193 |
| Month off | 0 | $580 | All of it, for nothing |
Monthly evaluations, data, platforms and memberships keep billing while you're busy at work, sick or traveling. If you know a slow stretch is coming, pause or cancel what you can before the billing date. The cheapest month is the one you planned not to trade.
Read your money statement month by month
Line your monthly totals up in a simple table: month, money out, money in, result, running total. Patterns jump out quickly.
- Spikes after bad days. Months with several resets or replacement accounts often follow a blowup. That's emotional spending, and it's usually the biggest single leak.
- A slow creep. One new tool, then another course, then a second data feed. Each was small; together they doubled your base cost.
- Income hiding costs. A month with a payout looks fine, but the costs that month may still be higher than they need to be.
If you'd like a full template, see a trading profit and loss statement.
How to bring your burn rate down
- Set a monthly cap for firm fees. When it's spent, no more evaluations or resets until next month.
- Wait a day before any rebuy. No reset or new account on the day you blew one. See why you should stop buying another account.
- One evaluation at a time until you pass one. Running several multiplies the monthly bill.
- Trade micros while you learn. Lower commissions per trade and smaller losses per mistake.
- Cancel anything you didn't use last month. Platforms, courses and signal groups included.
- Pause billing for planned breaks. Put the billing dates in your calendar.
- Make accounts last longer. Fewer blown accounts means fewer replacement fees. A personal daily loss limit below the firm's helps most; see set your own daily loss limit.
For why starting lean matters so much in the first year, read keep your trading costs low.
See your burn rate in My Trading Journey
In Market Matrix, you log each cost in a few seconds and record payouts on your funded accounts. The Am I profitable? part of My Trading Journey then builds a money statement with one row per month, quarter or year, a running total and a totals row, which you can export to CSV. It also shows where the money went by category, spending by firm, and a ledger of every entry you can filter by type or date. Click any month's number to see exactly which charges are behind it.
See your monthly costs in My Trading Journey →
Once you know your burn rate, see how far you are from trading paying for itself in your break-even point as a prop trader.
This article is for education only and isn't financial advice. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss.