It Costs (About) 10 Cents to Trade $10,000

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.