On one buy, fees are negligible. On 500 buys, they become a measurable number. In DCA, the small frictions work quietly and deserve attention.
How fees stack up
Binance typically charges 0.1% per order, less if you hold BNB or have a higher VIP tier. Across a DCA running for years, those 0.1% become:
- Roughly 0.2% total per buy plus sell cycle on average.
- At a 5% take-profit, that is 4% of the gross gain.
- At a 1% take-profit, that is 20% of the gross gain.
The tighter the take-profit, the larger the share fees eat. In extreme cases, the net result from many very small take-profits can be worse than fewer moderate ones.
What dust is
Dust is the small leftover quantity of an asset sitting in your account that is too small to trade as its own order.
Typical example: Binance has a 0.00001 BTC minimum per order. If rounding or cancellations leave 0.000007 BTC somewhere, you cannot sell that as a spot order. It is dust.
Binance has an automatic dust conversion feature that turns dust into BNB once every 24 hours. Practical, especially if you run multiple plans.
Rounding and minimum sizes
Each Binance pair has two limits to respect:
- Minimum notional: how much quote asset the order must carry. For BTC/EUR usually 10 EUR.
- Minimum lot size: the smallest amount of the base asset. For BTC usually 0.00001 BTC.
If your DCA amount sits near the minimum notional, rounding can quietly drop a few orders. Solution: give a small buffer above the minimum, for example 12 EUR instead of 10 EUR.
On sells, rounding works the other way. The sellable quantity rounds down. That often leaves a bit of dust behind. Natural. Not a bug.
