There is a meter running on every desk in this market, and most people have stopped hearing it. Nobody chose per ticket brokerage. They arrived, and it was already there.
There is a meter running on every desk in this market. Most people have stopped hearing it.
Every ticket, every fill, every amendment: the meter ticks. It has ticked for so long that desks treat it like weather, a condition of the market rather than a decision anyone made. Nobody on your desk chose per ticket brokerage. They arrived, and it was already there.
A per ticket charge is not a tax on value received. It is a tax on activity itself.
It taxes the hedge you put on to reduce risk. It taxes the order you split into ten pieces to work it responsibly. It taxes the busy day exactly as hard as the profitable one, because the charge tracks tickets, not outcomes.
Whatever behaviour a market should want more of, the meter charges for it.
And because the cost moves with volume, the desk carries a budget line it cannot plan without forecasting the market itself. Worse, it never settles. The charge is not one number. It moves with trade size, with notional, and with whichever rate card applies to that product on that day.
Rate cards do not fall.
Every other piece of infrastructure on your desk abandoned this years ago.
Your market data screen does not bill you per quote you look at. Your risk system does not invoice per position you open. They charge a subscription, because the cost of serving you does not rise with the intensity of your use, and because a supplier who profits from your activity is a supplier whose interests diverge from yours the moment you get busy.
Interdealer brokerage never made that move. It is the last screen on the desk still charging per interaction.
It carries no live pricing feed and no lookup table of what anyone charges, because we are not going to tell you what your broker bills you. You are.
Enter your own rate, your trades per day, your average size and your trading days. The page computes from your numbers and nothing else, which means identical inputs always return an identical result and every figure can be reproduced line by line.
Four tabs, each on its own desk convention: FX swaps, interest rates, bonds and NDFs. Rates in basis points of notional at market convention. The rest per million traded, denominated in the currency you are trading rather than a fixed currency per product.
The opening defaults are the one place judgement enters, so every one of them is published with the validated range it came from.
We are showing our working because the argument only counts if you can check it.
Rate cards do not fall. The subscription does not rise.
It is a different relationship.
A flat fee means the venue earns the same whether you trade once or four hundred times. Which means the venue has no incentive to want your ticket count high, and no reason to price your busiest week as your most expensive one.
Put in the rate you actually pay, not the rate you think is standard.
Then tell me what the annual figure came out at, or tell me the calculation is wrong and where. I will answer either way.