The original and still most common model for a share-trading business is to build a profit margin into the brokerage.

The more that someone trades, the more that the broker profits. So a ‘conflict’ will arise – as in, is the feature or recommendation to help you with your investments, or just to generate more trades for them.

If the profit margin is in the brokerage, then the bigger traders cover all the costs of servicing the smaller traders. So there are some people that benefit from this model, but it is to the disadvantage of the others. Which isn’t really fair.  

At Marketech Focus, you effectively pay the ASX for your own data usage, you pay us for our platform and service, and you get your trades at our cost.

We’ve all seen the commentary that brokers send out. Should you be switching from CBA to ANZ because it’s a better investment, or is it because they don’t get paid unless you transact? Are those ‘most talked about stocks’ designed to improve your investment returns, or to keep you trading, constantly worried that someone else must know more than you?

The rise of low-cost broking in Australia has also brought with it a number of new hidden costs. One of them is the pooled trust. 

When you put anything into the ‘trust’ of someone else, it requires that you have to trust that someone else. They have the keys to your money – and that requires a lot of trust!

But this kind of trust also keeps all of the interest on your money for themselves, which allows them to seem ‘low cost’. But often the interest that you don’t get in this higher risk ownership structure can be quite significant.

(See below for a breakdown against various interest rates and amounts, your interest losses may be more than the cost of our subscriptions!)

And finally, the ASX and CBOE markets charge companies to display the live market to their clients. For live prices on the ASX, it is up to $20 per user per month plus GST. Then it costs more for live news, more for delayed news, more for delayed prices and so forth…

So the best way to keep that cost down is to reduce your access to that live data!

By putting different data points on different pages they can wear you out, constantly changing webpages looking for the most current information. But you can also miss an opportunity that costs you more than you think you are saving.

And in some cases, companies will only show you price data that is 20-min delayed, or the newest twist of ‘derived prices’, where it’s a price based on the trades of a CFD market and not even the real stockmarket itself!

Marketech Focus charges you only when you want access to live prices, and we unashamedly won’t let you buy and sell stocks without knowing what the live price is. Missing a trade can cost you far more than the small cost of the live market data. Sometimes we just have to protect people from themselves…

We also pass on the wholesale cost of trading from our settlement partner, Openmarkets, with no margin added. Same with Sharesight and their portfolio reporting – its just a connected service, that makes our platform more appealing, helping us to sell more platforms.

You keep all the interest on your cash in a linked Macquarie CMA, which you manage yourself. We cannot touch your money at all, but you will need a third-party approval for Openmarkets to direct debit for any shares that you buy and sell.

We charge a margin only on the platform. So our only desire, our only motivation is to make that platform better. For you. Not to get you to trade more, not to get you to put more money into a pooled bank account and not to convince you to start trading CFDs or international shares where the margin is higher.

Marketech Focus – pricing the way it should be.

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