The American Stock Exchange has changed its transaction fees for exchange-traded notes (ETNs) to bring them in line with charges for exchange-traded funds. Previously, the instruments, which are linked to indexes, commodities, currencies, futures and combinations of the above, incurred transaction fees that apply to equities and are higher than ETF fees. As a result, fees for ETN transactions are going down to $0.0023 per share from $0.0030 a share. They are capped at $100 per transaction, which means that charges will be assessed only on the first 43,478 shares. Routed transactions will still incur $0.0030 a share fees and another $0.0004 per share will be added for transaction cleared at other market centers.
The exchange is also planning to distribute revenue from ETNs to specialists, registered traders and designated Amex remote traders (DARTs). Specialists will get paid as much as $0.0024 per share whenever his quote is traded against or offsets an imbalance. Those who aren’t liquidity providers will get $0.0004 as part of the revenue sharing program. Registered traders will get $0.0010 per share and DART will receive $0.0015 per share when they provide liquidity. Traders said ETNs have been picking up steam and should be treated like exchange traded funds to promote them further.