The ASX is listed on the ASX. It has shareholders. They demand profits and growth. So the ASX sells the data that it creates through its markets to users of that data.

For live prices alone, it is up to $20 per user per month.

But that is in addition to the cost of supplying you with delayed prices for backfilling charts and supplying historical data, delayed news articles (live news costs up to $22 per month), plus the cost of getting that data from the ASX - and the cost of getting it from a third party, like Refinitiv and Iress.

There was also a Hayne Royal Commission into the state of the financial services markets in Australia. One of the primary outcomes was that they believed it is better for you to pay for a service that you receive, rather than to pay a commission on the transaction.

If there is a commission on the transaction then a conflict will arise, as the supplier of that service is then motivated to have you transact more often.

Having a profit in the brokerage rate is the most common method of pricing brokerage. All of the major online companies do it. Even worse, they have a headline brokerage rate that seems very low as it is based on a very small trnsaction size, but then they charge much higher rates for normal-sized parcels – then, discount it for heavier traders, which incentivises people to trade more!

At Marketech, we believe you should not be allowed to trade shares (the highest risk real asset class that there is) whithout knowing the latest price. Other companies will allow you to trade on delayed data to save you that cost, but we will not.

We also only charge a profit margin on top of the ASX live-data costs, that way we don’t have to incentivise you to trade more. It also means that we are motivated to continually improve our product – as our product is not ‘cheap brokerage’, it’s a professional grade trading platform.

Other companies will also keep the interest on your cash holdings, in order to make a profit or to seem ‘lower cost’. This is what we call a ‘fee for no service’ at Marketech, and it is often more than the cost of our subscription!

When you are not trading, just sit back on the delayed data version. There’s no cost. Then, if you want to trade, just turn on the live prices, whether it’s the ‘click to refresh’ FocusPlus, or the top-of-the-range live-streaming FocusPro.

Too many people think that finding the absolute lowest cost of trading shares is all you need to do to outperform, and to do that they will sacrifice information about the market itself.

And maybe its best to just let them think that, as you always need someone else on the other side of a trade.

Marketech Focus – low-cost, but no hidden costs.