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The cost-to-trade ladder: median quoted spread in bps of the midpoint, regular hours, recent completed sessions

Answered against 22 years of US equities and 12 years of US options data and published with the query that produced it. This result is stored as of 2026-08-22, from What It Costs to Trade a Stock, Measured.

as of table 12×5read in context →
The cost-to-trade ladder: median quoted spread in bps of the midpoint, regular hours, recent completed sessions — 12 rows by 5 columns, computed from US exchange, SIP and OPRA data.
tickertypical_spread_bpstypical_spread_centsquote_updates_mpct_updates_excluded
SPY0.2629.30.64
QQQ0.28215.70.43
IWM0.3319.21.49
NVDA0.8927.60.74
AAPL0.9833.90.52
KO1.1511.71.55
MSFT1.891.40.18
DIS1.9220.90.66
TSLA1.9972.90.38
SOXS2.5519.42.38
AMD4.7231.70.1
F7.1610.54.56
Rows × columns
12 × 5
Computed
Completeness
No missing values
Source
US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data
Licence
Strasmore terms · free, no signup
Formats
JSON · CSV · the SQL below

What each column holds

Column definitions for The cost-to-trade ladder: median quoted spread in bps of the midpoint, regular hours, recent completed sessions, derived from the stored result.
ColumnTypeRangeNotes
ticker text 12 distinct values (AAPL, AMD, DIS…)
typical_spread_bps number 0.26 to 7.16
typical_spread_cents number 1 to 23
quote_updates_m number 0.5 to 15.7
pct_updates_excluded number 0.1 to 4.56 percent

Computed from Strasmore's warehouse of US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data. Equity prices are delayed; options greeks and implied volatility are end-of-day. This result is stored, not recomputed on load — it is exactly the numbers that were returned on , and the query below is what returned them.

the exact SQL behind every number 
SELECT ticker,
       round(quantileExactIf(0.5)(toFloat64(ask_price - bid_price) / (toFloat64(ask_price + bid_price) / 2), bid_price > 0 AND ask_price > bid_price) * 10000, 2) AS typical_spread_bps,
       round(quantileExactIf(0.5)(toFloat64(ask_price - bid_price), bid_price > 0 AND ask_price > bid_price) * 100, 1) AS typical_spread_cents,
       round(count() / 1e6, 1) AS quote_updates_m,
       round(100 * countIf(bid_price <= 0 OR ask_price <= 0 OR ask_price <= bid_price) / count(), 2) AS pct_updates_excluded
FROM global_markets.cache_stocks_quotes
WHERE ticker IN ('SPY', 'QQQ', 'IWM', 'AAPL', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'AMD', 'TSLA', 'KO', 'DIS', 'F', 'SOXS')
  AND sip_timestamp >= toDateTime(today() - 10)
  AND sip_timestamp < toDateTime(today() - 3)
  AND (toHour(sip_timestamp) * 60 + toMinute(sip_timestamp)) BETWEEN 810 AND 1199
GROUP BY ticker
ORDER BY typical_spread_bps

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