Total trading charges in the global marketplace have come down on the back of technological advances. However, implicit costs have fallen roughly three times faster than the explicit or measurable costs, claims a new report by Gary Croft, an e-finance analyst with Deutsche Bank Alex Brown.

The study says that explicit costs are the easy identifiable factors such as commissions, taxes and related exchange fees. Implicit costs include the harder-to-predict dealer spreads, the inability to complete trades and/or adverse price movements - in other words, those items that do not appear on the brokerage statement.