I *think* I made a mistake

Hey folks, I'm looking forward to get some feedback from ya.

I bought some Algorand on Coinbase Advanced (on ramp fiat 0% fee -> post only buy) then sent it to another wallet. The transfer fee was close to zero because of how their network operates (yay!), but after buying Algorand on CB I noticed that let's say, out of 100$ worth of Algorand only 98$ made it to my wallet, and taking in consideration CB's buying fee, I ended up with like 96$ worth of ALGO. What happened? I'd be even more ripped off if I didn't use their Advanced feature. I'm wondering what I did wrong.

Anywho, the last step was converting ALGO to other coins and I had to pay fees for that as well, but if I'm not mistaken it wasn't that bad.

The thing is that I only deposited fiat in my CB account because the other platform that I use doesn't accept my local currency. Maybe I should've went with KuCoin? Should I have used Uniswap to convert ALGO so I'd pay lower fees?

I'll take this as a lesson and try to do better next time. Please share how your step-by-step looks like to pay lower fees when buying, sending and converting coins. Thanks!

Oh yeah, last but not least, do you stake stablecoins? If yes or no, why? Cheers.