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> Whatever you pay to your brokerage, you pay on top of the spread. The spread is what you pay to place a market order. I agree with you for the case of a "buy and hold" investor buying or selling actual shares of stock (with the proviso that the overhead to such an investor is already pretty low since he doesn't execute many trades, so the gain to him from something like HFT decreasing the bid-ask spread is small). But as I noted, many, probably most, "buy and hold" investors hold mutual funds through 401k's, not individual stocks. For example, I have a 401k. I don't place market orders. I rebalance my portfolio every so often, which, after a lot of intermediate steps, might result in some mutual fund manager placing a market order. But I don't see any of the direct costs associated with that, whether it's paying the spread or anything else. I only see the net overhead of the mutual fund as a whole. (And, as I noted, for a lot of 401k's, like mine, I don't even see that, because the 401k mutual funds are no-load.) |
Whether it is a direct line item on your prospectus or not is immaterial. No load mutual funds are more successful when they have lower execution costs. The biggest driver to low execution costs is an electronic market and then the bid/ask spread. HFT enable both of those low costs.