About the exchange
Ammunition is a commodity.
It has never been traded like one.
The same round, the same headstamp, the same lot — and four retailers will quote you four prices, none of which you can ever sell back at. SecureAmmo puts a live two-sided book underneath it.
- Contracts listed
- 55
- Rounds vaulted
- 3,358,500
- Traded, 24h
- 0
- Licensed vaults
- 5
Why it exists
The problem was never the price. It’s that there isn’t one.
You already know how this goes.
The same 5.56 that was forty cents a round in the spring is over a dollar by the fall, and nothing about the ammunition changed — only the length of the line in front of it. So you either bought early and stacked it in a closet, or you paid the top and called it insurance.
Both are bad trades. Neither one is your fault. Ammunition has never had a public price — no bid, no ask, no tape, and no way out of a position except to shoot it.
No price discovery
A retail listing is one seller’s inventory on one afternoon. It is not what the round is worth.
No way out
Buy wrong and you own it forever. There is no bid to hit — only a forum post and a folding table at a gun show.
No granularity
You buy boxes and cases because that is how a pallet breaks down. Not because that is what you needed.
Storage is your problem
Heat, humidity, theft, and whatever your homeowner’s policy has to say about forty pounds of it in a closet.
How it works
Buy it, vault it, then decide later.
Buy by the round
Every SKU on the exchange is a contract with a live bid and ask, quoted to a tenth of a cent. Take the offer, or rest your own price on the book and wait to be hit. One round or fifty thousand — the ticket does not care. A box is only a multiplier we put on the screen for convenience.
It settles into a vault
A fill moves title, not boxes. Your rounds sit in one of 5 licensed facilities, booked to your name and insured at full replacement value. Nothing is packed, nothing is handled, and the rounds you just bought never move an inch.
Leave it, sell it, or ship it
Hold it and pay custody by the round. Sell it back into the same book you bought it from. Or request delivery and take physical possession — to your door, or to a licensed dealer where your state requires one.
Custody
Every round on this book exists on a shelf.
This is the part worth being specific about, because it is the part most commodity markets get to hand-wave.
There is no paper here. You cannot sell a round you do not have. An offer reserves the actual rounds out of your holding before it ever reaches the book, a bid reserves the actual cash, and cancelling releases exactly the unfilled remainder. Nothing can be committed twice.
Two numbers follow every SKU in every vault: what members own on the books, and what is physically on the shelf. Vault operations reconciles them, and they must agree. When rounds finally leave the building — because somebody asked for them — the member’s position and the shelf count come down inside the same transaction, with a movement record written against it.
The books cannot drift from the building.
The vault network
- ATLPiedmont ArmoryAtlantaGA
- CMHBuckeye BunkerColumbusOH
- DFWNorth Texas VaultFort WorthTX
- PHXSonoran DepotPhoenixAZ
- RNOSierra StorageRenoNV
Your position lives in the facility the seller held it in, which is why the vault code travels with every holding, every order and every delivery request on the site.
The engine
The rules of the book, in plain English.
A market is only as good as the promises it can actually keep. These are ours, and each one is a property of how the matching engine is built rather than a policy we could quietly relax on a busy day.
You get the maker's price, not yours
Cross the spread and you fill at the resting order’s price, not at your own limit. The seller set the terms; the difference you did not have to pay goes straight back to your buying power. Price improvement is the default here, not a feature.
Price first, then time
A continuous limit order book with price-time priority. The better price goes first, and at the same price whoever got there first goes first. There is no queue you can pay to skip.
Nothing rounds
Every amount in the system is a whole number of mills — thousandths of a dollar. A fill is a price multiplied by a count of rounds, with no division anywhere in the path, so not one fraction of a cent can go missing between what you are debited and what the seller is credited. Commission is a separate line, floored in your favour, and never touches the execution price.
You are never your own counterparty
Self-matching is blocked outright, so nobody can trade with themselves to paint a price on the tape.
Market orders never rest
A market buy fills as far as your settled cash reaches, and whatever is left over is cancelled rather than parked on the book at a price you never chose.
One book at a time
Matching is serialised per contract, so two orders on the same book can never interleave and see a half-updated market. Different books still run concurrently.
Costs
What it costs to use.
Two things decide this list. Ammunition is bulky and cheap by the round, so what it costs to keep is floor space and insurance rather than a percentage of its value — a case of plinking .22 takes up the same shelf as a case of match .308, and is billed the same.
And the quotes resting on the book are the thing that makes it worth trading against. So the side that puts them there is never charged.
And the line most exchanges leave off.
Uninvested cash sitting in member accounts earns interest, and the exchange keeps it. That is the quiet majority of what pays for this — it is why custody sits near cost, why resting an order is free, and why there is no account fee. Worth knowing before you leave a large balance here instead of somewhere that pays you for it.
Worked example
Take a thousand-round case off the offer at $0.60 a round. The ammunition is $600.00, crossing the spread costs $3.00, and storing it costs nothing — it fits inside the free allowance.
Sit on fifteen thousand rounds instead and custody runs $14.00 a month. Rest your own bid rather than taking the offer and the commission is $0.00.
Eligibility
Who can take delivery.
Trading and storage open at 18. Taking physical possession of handgun ammunition requires 21 — that is federal, and it is checked against the date of birth on your account rather than a box you tick.
Some states do not allow ammunition to arrive at a residence at all. California, New York, Massachusetts and Hawaii route it through a licensed dealer. Connecticut and Illinois want a permit or FOID on file. New Jersey restricts handgun ammunition specifically. The District of Columbia we do not ship to.
The destination is checked while you are still filling in the form, not after you submit it, and the server checks it again before anything is released from a vault. You can buy and hold from anywhere. Where it is allowed to physically go gets decided when you ask for it — which is the honest place to decide it.
Straight answers
What’s real, and what isn’t yet.
A market asking you to trust it with custody should say plainly what it has and has not built.
The matching engine, the order book, the ledger and the custody accounting are real, and they run on every trade. Deposits, though, credit the ledger directly — no payment processor is wired up and no card is charged. Age and residency are self-reported at signup rather than verified against documents. And the book is rendered fresh on every request rather than streamed, so prices update when you do.
On the price list: custody and its free allowance are live and billed as described. The taker commission is set but not yet collected — the trade path charges nothing today, so every fill is currently free on both sides. Nobody is being quietly billed for it.
The delivery rules are modelled on real federal and state law, but they are a working ruleset rather than legal advice, and they need a lawyer’s sign-off before a single round ships for real.
Open an account and watch the book for a while.
It is free, it takes about a minute, and none of it commits you to buying anything. You can read every price on the exchange before you fund a cent.
Free to open. Delivery eligibility is checked when you ship, not when you buy.