[stouset]

> ...also allowed trading fees for the retail investor to reach historic lows (the worst you'll find at a retail brokerage nowadays is about $8/trade, far better than the $35/trade

The average retail investor should not be making enough trades for this to matter.

Bringing down the price of trades like this only makes it cheaper for the suckers — day traders — to think they're playing the game. It is of marginal utility for the average retail investor.

[URSpider94]

That's not a fair assessment. Let's say you are doing well and actually investing $1000 per month into the market. Now let's say you are diversifying into three index ETF's, and you buy those quarterly, so that's three trades a quarter on a total of $3,000. If the commission is $35/trade, you are being taxed 3.5% of your investment up-front to get into the market. If the commission is $4/trade (a more typical fee these days), then the up-front loss is 0.4%. You'll pay those same fees again on the way out, and assuming that you sell on the same schedule, that's now 7% vs. 0.8%.

Yes, there's some nice compounding in between, assuming that you buy and hold with no further trades. But, there's a wide gulf between "day trading" and active stock-picking. Assuming that your average hold time is 5 years per stock, you're still going to rack up a lot of commission costs at $35 per trade.