We’ve been tracking the all-in cost to trade U.S. equities for several years, and the story has consistently been one of falling costs and rising efficiency.
Today, we’re updating that analysis through 2025 and introducing a small but meaningful methodological tweak that makes the picture even cleaner.
Our prior work measured costs in mils (cents per 100 shares traded). That’s the industry standard, and it’s useful. But it has a quirk: It can be distorted by heavy trading in low-priced stocks, where share counts are high, but dollar values are small.
Traders don’t size positions in shares; they size them in dollars.
Buying $10,000 of a $10 stock (1,000 shares) and $10,000 of a $100 stock (100 shares) are economically equivalent decisions. So,measuring cost per $10,000 traded aligns with how investors actually think. It also makes year-over-year comparisons cleaner as average stock prices drift higher over time.
In short, this is a more economically relevant way to look at the same data.
And the economically relevant measure is the all-in cost to trade, including explicit, implicit, and opportunity costs, since investors and traders route orders based on their platform-wide costs, as we have discussed in the past.
Real cost to trade has halved since 2017
The headline number here is striking.
Since 2017, the all-in cost to trade has fallen by roughly one-third in nominal terms. Adjust for inflation, and costs are down about 50% because trading $10,000 worth of stock today costs just 9 cents in 2017 dollars.
That’s a remarkable result for any industry, let alone one as complex as U.S. equity market structure.
Chart 1: Industry-wide all-in cost to trade $10,000 down by a third in nominal dollars
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Rising dollar volumes have played a role (gold line), as more activity is spread across a relatively fixed infrastructure, which lowers per-unit costs.
Nasdaq consistently cheapest established trading group since 2018
Competition across venues has been the other key driver, and that clearly shows when you break out the data by exchange (Nasdaq, NYSE, Cboe, IEX, MEMX, and MIAX).
Chart 2: All-in costs to mostly flat-to-down since 2020, defying broader inflation
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A few things stand out:
Competition keeping pressure on prices despite fragmentation
Fragmentation in U.S. equity markets has real costs. More venues mean more connections, more complexity and more routing decisions. At a minimum, some of the blue colors in Chart 2 might be caused by this fragmentation, in addition to the costs of brokers’ data center space and hardware.
As we see above, new entrants add costs immediately to the industry. While they initially discount their prices to gain market share and achieve economies of scale, they then raise prices, making it even more expensive for the industry as a whole.
Still, for all the complexity of a market structure spread across dozens of venues, it costs brokers around a dime to trade $10,000 worth of stock.
