Brokerage firm clients aren’t the only ones grumbling about paying high fees these days. The firms themselves have raised a ruckus with Canada’s securities regulators about the costs they must pay to buy trading data from stock exchanges and alternative trading systems.

There was once a time when firms simply bought Toronto Stock Exchange and Toronto Venture Exchange data, giving them live feeds about pricing and trading volume for stocks as they traded throughout the day. But those simple days are long gone, and now brokerage firms must pay for data from a large variety of alternative trading systems such as Chi-X, Omega, Alpha, CNSX and Pure, even if they rarely trade on the exchanges, just to ensure they can exercise orders at the best possible price.