The price a trader pays to enter a position is only part of what a trade actually costs. Holding cost is the total of everything that erodes a leveraged crypto position while it stays open: entry and exit trading fees, cumulative funding paid or received, any separate borrow or interest charge, and slippage on execution. Two positions that look identical on a price chart can produce very different outcomes once holding cost is accounted for, especially the longer a position stays open.
Four components typically make up the full figure. Trading fees are charged once on entry and again on exit, and are usually the most predictable of the four since they scale directly with position size. Funding accrues repeatedly across every settlement interval the position remains open, and can add to or subtract from cost depending on its sign, as covered in the funding rate explained guide . A borrow or interest charge, where a venue applies one, accrues on borrowed capital much like funding does but is calculated separately — the distinction is covered in the borrow fee guide . Slippage, the difference between the expected execution price and the price actually received, rounds out the total and tends to matter most on large orders or thin markets.
Trading fees are paid once per side regardless of how long a position is held, but funding and any borrow charge accrue continuously, which means holding cost grows with time even if the position's size never changes. Canborsa expresses this directly: its holding cost accrues at roughly 10% annualized, applied hourly, so a position's carrying cost compounds gradually through every hour it stays open. On a $10,000 position, a 10% annual rate works out to roughly $2.74 per day if held at a constant size — a useful anchor for estimating what a multi-day hold actually costs before entering it, separate from whatever funding does on top of that base rate.
The same cost structure produces very different outcomes depending on holding period. A position opened and closed within minutes pays the round-trip trading fee and negligible funding, so the trading fee dominates the total cost almost entirely. A position held for weeks pays that same round-trip fee once, but funding and holding-cost accrual compound across every interval in between, and can end up costing several times more than the entry and exit fees combined. This is why a strategy's expected holding period needs to be part of the cost estimate from the start.
Slippage is the gap between the price a trader expects to pay and the price an order actually fills at, driven by order size relative to available liquidity at the moment of execution. A market order on a deep, liquid pair typically fills close to the displayed price; the same order size on a thin market can fill meaningfully worse, especially during fast-moving conditions when liquidity thins out further. Because slippage doesn't appear on any published fee schedule, it is the easiest component of holding cost to underestimate, and the one most worth checking directly against actual fill prices.
A venue advertising the lowest trading fee is not automatically the cheapest place to hold a position, because trading fees are only one row in the total. A platform with a slightly higher entry fee but tighter, more consistent funding and no separate borrow charge can end up cheaper overall for a position held more than a few hours, while a platform with the lowest advertised fee but volatile funding can end up costing more once the position has been open for days. The only reliable comparison adds every component together over a realistic holding period.
Estimating each row before entering is what separates a cost estimate from a cost realization. The maker and taker fees guide covers the trading-fee row in more detail, including how fee structures differ between flat-rate and tiered venues.
Rebuilding this estimate periodically for an open position is worth the habit. Funding can drift meaningfully from the level it sat at on day one, and a position that looked cheap to hold when it was opened can quietly become expensive to maintain weeks later if funding has moved against it in the meantime. Treating the total-cost figure as a live number catches that drift before it shows up as an unpleasant surprise on close.
It is the sum of entry and exit trading fees, cumulative funding accrued over the holding period, any separate borrow or interest charge, and slippage on execution. All four scale differently, so the total depends heavily on how long the position stays open and how it was sized.
Holding cost is another name for the same total: the ongoing price of keeping a leveraged position open, distinct from the one-time cost of entering it. On Canborsa it is expressed as roughly 10% annualized, accrued hourly, on top of funding and trading fees.
Total cost of ownership is the complete picture of what a position costs from open to close, combining trading fees, funding, any borrow charge, and slippage into a single figure. It is the number that should be compared against expected returns before sizing a position.
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