I wanted to keep this discussion in the correct thread, but it is largely inspired by the following quote from the committee fee discussion thread.
I can assure you forex, stock, option, futures traders do take fee's seriously... but only if the fee's are exorbant.
They will not care if a fee is 1 cent or $1. What they will care about is when they see they could execute a $100,000 trade on ETrade and pay $7 in commissions, but then try to do that same trade in bitshares and pay $100. Then imagine if people start using leverage with bond market... multiply their costs by 10.
If you are going to do the %based fee's, there needs to be a ceiling involved. My back of the napkin sweetspot would be %based fee's up to $20... $20 is half the price that many ECN brokers charge to do larger forex orders.
If forex clients would be happy with a $1 flat fee to trade in our markets then I think MT4 integration could be funded with a fee backed asset. Lets assume for the sake of argument that development and licensing would cost $250,000. You could attempt to fund that with a multi sig owned UIA. Set a giant sell wall at $10.00 per share or whatever. If the funds are not raised within a certain cutoff period, put up a giant buy wall at $10.00. You could do this in the USD market, or just adjust it frequently in the BTS market. Even with having to adjust it, BTS might be better due to current liquidity. You could even accept BTC through meta or blocktrades.
Once enough money is raised development begins, and this uia is converted 1 to 1 to the new FBA. If we had a base limit order create fee roughly 3 times what it currently is, or $0.10 then the FBA would still be able to take in $0.90 per trade. If the system proves to be popular we could probably even raise the fee over $1.
Someone with knowledge of this industry needs to do more than spitball a rough estimate of cost. Who is willing to sell a license. How much? What would be the regulatory aspects? How could we protect the license?
Then hit up CNX or abit or another dev, and get a quote on development cost. Be very open on the cut that you are taking yourself for putting this together.
Once we have a number we can start talking about when and how we would acquire users, how many trades on average we expect them to make. From there we can extrapolate fee requirements.
Depending on all of the factors above, I think this could be a very lucrative use of a persons time. If the price is right I would invest in the FBA, and I am sure some whales would be interested as well.