01
Institutional TCA is enterprise-priced
Transaction cost analysis has measured exactly this for twenty years. It comes with annual contracts, procurement and integrations measured in months, and it serves funds with compliance departments.
02
Trade journals assume a human
Everything built below that line is designed around a person clicking buy a few times a day. They count trades. None of them measure execution, and none of them see an order break apart.
03
The desks in between are where this starts
Teams running real strategies at real size, on retail exchange APIs, losing real money to execution with no tooling that speaks their language. They are the beachhead rather than the market, because they hold the data and can check the arithmetic themselves. The same measurement goes up — to prop desks and funds kept out of institutional TCA by procurement rather than by budget — and sideways, to the far larger number of people who buy a bot instead of writing one and have no way to tell whether it executes well. None of them can grade themselves, which is the whole point.