Online investing is popular—and still growing. With a number of brokerage firms slashing their costs to zero, it’s easy to see why it continues to grab market share from traditional brokerage firms.

In the United States in particular, there are a number of reasons why trading stocks online is so popular, and so common.

First, online stock trading is based off of technology—and American culture embraces technological development faster than the rest of the world. The United States developed the internet out of ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Netwrok, largely as a military project. However, the developers used the same tools to create a way of communicating digitally, and the commercial aspects led to the gradual creation of the Internet.