Worked example

Practising on tastyfx's numbers

This is an exercise sheet, not a review. We are going to take three things that tastyfx publishes — a spread, a ladder of account types and a list of licences — and turn each of them into something you can do arithmetic with. By the end you should be able to repeat the whole exercise on any firm you come across, which is the actual skill being taught.

Attached to: Turning a spread into money·The lesson this practises

The figures we are working from

Nothing below is our estimate. Where a firm has not published something, or we could not read it on a source we trust, the box says so instead of guessing — a habit worth copying when you build your own broker notes.

0.8Published EUR/USD spread, pips

$0Minimum to open, USD

not verifiedTrading since

Chicago, Illinois, United StatesHead office

1:50 (US majors, CFTC limit)Retail leverage cap

1Licence lines on file

Exercise one — turn the spread into money

The spread is the gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at, and you pay it the instant you enter. tastyfx publishes 0.8 pips on EUR/USD. On its own that number means nothing. Here is how it becomes money.

1Fix what one pip is worthOn a one standard lot EUR/USD position — 100,000 units — a one-pip move is worth $10. That is a property of the contract size, not of tastyfx, and it holds wherever you trade.

2Multiply the spread by the pip value0.8 pips × $10 a pip = $8.00. That is what it costs to open and close one standard lot here, before any commission the account may also charge.

3Scale it down to a size you should actually tradeA beginner has no business trading a standard lot. At 0.01 lots — a micro — every figure divides by a hundred: the same round turn costs $0.08. Small enough to practise with, large enough to be real.

4Ask what the cost buys youA $500 float would be entirely consumed by 62 standard-lot round turns at this spread and nothing else. That is the number that should change how often you click.

A 1.0-lot EUR/USD round turn here costs about $8.00 in spread at $10 a pip — before any commission.

Now do it without us

Take the spread of any other firm on the practice index, run the same four steps, and write both figures down — per lot and per micro. When you can do that in your head you have stopped shopping on marketing copy and started shopping on cost. The pip value calculator will check your working on pairs where the pip is not a flat ten dollars.

Exercise two — read the account ladder

Account tiers are a pricing structure dressed as a status ladder. tastyfx offers 2 rungs. Read them as a question — what does each rung ask of me, and what does it give back? — rather than as a set of prizes to climb towards.

StandardThe entry rung. Whatever the published spread applies to, it is almost always this one — so this is the rung your arithmetic above describes.
Zero+A higher rung usually trades a tighter spread for a commission, a larger deposit, or a status test. Convert both pricing models to money per lot before you decide either is cheaper.

Account names as published: Standard, Zero+. Platforms listed: tastyfx web platform, MT4, MT5, Mobile apps.

Exercise three — what this licence list means for you

A long licence list is not automatically a good sign. What matters to a beginner is a narrower question: which entity would hold my money, and who supervises that entity? Those are often not the same as the impressive name at the top of the list. Here are tastyfx's lines, each with a plain reading.

Regulator	Entity on the register	Number	What that means for a beginner
CFTC / NFA · United States	tastyfx, LLC (formerly IG US LLC)	NFA ID 0509630	a top-tier regulator: compensation scheme, capital rules and a public register you can search yourself

How to use that table

1 of these line is top-tier — held by tastyfx, LLC (formerly IG US LLC). If you are onboarded to a different entity than those, the protections attached to the top-tier line are not yours, however prominently the regulator's initials appear in the marketing.

The record behind these numbers

tastyfx, LLC is a CFTC-registered Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer and NFA member with NFA ID 0509630.
IG US rebranded its US forex brokerage to tastyfx in 2024; tastyfx is part of IG Group, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
tastyfx publishes a minimum EUR/USD spread of 0.8 pips and a minimum margin requirement of 2% on that pair.
tastytrade's support pages state there is no minimum deposit to open and maintain a tastyfx account, though funds must cover margin requirements.
tastyfx offers forex only; US retail forex leverage is capped by CFTC rules at 50:1 on major pairs.

What we could not verify

The following are unconfirmed and are deliberately left blank rather than estimated: founding year of the US entity; segregated funds treatment (US retail forex funds are not segregated in the same way as futures customer funds); negative balance protection; founding year. Confidence in this file overall: high. When you build your own notes on a firm, keep a list like this one — the gaps are more useful than the figures, because they tell you what to go and check.

Back to the lesson →All worked examples Size a trade with these figures

Run the same exercise on another firm

ActivTrades0.5 pips published, $5.00 per standard lot.Practise →ATFX0.8 pips published, $8.00 per standard lot.Practise →Capital.com0.6 pips published, $6.00 per standard lot.Practise →CMC Markets0.5 pips published, $5.00 per standard lot.Practise →Decode Global0.9 pips published, $9.00 per standard lot.Practise →Eightcap0.1 pips published, $1.00 per standard lot.Practise →

pipdojo.com does not rank brokers, does not award badges and does not tell you where to open an account. This page exists so the arithmetic you learn in the curriculum has real numbers to bite on.