> People pay Nasdaq to make their trades reliable and safe. People pay Nasdaq because they have to pay someone. Only SEC-registered exchanges and ATSs can conf

> People pay Nasdaq to make their trades reliable and safe. People pay Nasdaq because they have to pay someone. Only SEC-registered exchanges and ATSs can confirm a transaction in publicly listed equities, then the DTC actually transfers ownership. And the amount you pay to transact stock at one of these places is the best deal you could find to transact virtually anything. I can't think of any popular good whose intermediary takes as little as exchanges like Nasdaq take (e.g. to buy $62,000 of Google stock, Nasdaq takes like 50 cents). > Reliable and safe trades can now be done by a swarm of computers running free software, and they only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth, energy and storage. When Nasdaq runs their own software, it's still free, and they pay zero margin over the cost of bandwidth, energy and storage. If you don't trust Nasdaq specifically, then you can use one of the other myriad exchanges and ATSs to trade on. And the existence of all of these trading venues have already pushed margins to an extremely competitive rate.