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so just a bit of background, im coming from thinkorswim primarily and decided i wanted to move to lightspeed trading platform primarily because its literally a zero-latency direct access brokerage. the following is basically a stream of consciousness riff on what ive experienced so far.
+ this shit is fast. if youre scalping or just trying to place trades between 9:30am and 10:30am, you understand that when you use a zero fee broker like td ameritrade/ToS, or literally any other, you are at their mercy when it comes to latency. fills can take 10-20 minutes, literally. lightspeed is a 'direct access' broker meaning you get routed directly to pools, you can even pick which pools you want your order routed to. not a single transaction ive performed on lightspeed took over 1 second to fill.
+ the software is clean af. its designed primarily to run on windows. hilariously they have a mac version thats nothing but the windows version running under wine (i swear to god this is true) but per their own support staff, they suggest just running it on windows. but ive had no memory issues, bloat issues, nothing. its like a stealth fighter cockpit with all the data coming at me but all of it is data i deliberately wanted in front of me. but yeah if you want to open/close positions with literal hotkeys & hotbuttons, this is the only game in town.
- the software is extremely complicated / advanced. this is basically designed for professionals and as such there isnt a lot of built in hand holding. so its incredibly easy to make expensive mistakes if you dont have everything set up exactly how you need it.
- its expensive. sorry but it just is. theres a monthly fee of around $130 plus the contract fees and believe me they add up. that said, when you have zero latency concerns, that precision buys you a percent or two of fill targets which can easily cover the contract fees.
- some of the bells and whistles it appears to not bundle with are stuff like ToS's scanner, scripting, backtesting, and studies. so i set up two monitors; top monitor is ToS, bottom is lightspeed. i use the top monitor to sort out entry points / validation and execute in lightspeed. shits slick tbh. but i do have some grave concerns about what im going to do if/when ToS gets nuked by schwab. i dont know why but i cant stomach web based brokers and the idea of trusting them with studies is really hard to trust fall into. may have to tho because schwab is definitely fucking up with ToS from what i hear.
+ another interesting point is that i wired money into my account on a tuesday night and by wed morning it was settled and available.
- and it was a lot of money because lightspeed has a 10k minimum and will literally want documentation on your finances if you try to open up a day trading account with 25k. also as a side note i deliberately requested a cash account and ended up being assigned like 4x margin. i called up the next morning to get that addressed and the next day it was sorted. thats really good customer service, is what that is.
so yeah honestly if you have the cash and it suits your needs, lightspeed is just kinda stunning, but be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort getting it tuned to your preferences. god its worth it tho.
+ this shit is fast. if youre scalping or just trying to place trades between 9:30am and 10:30am, you understand that when you use a zero fee broker like td ameritrade/ToS, or literally any other, you are at their mercy when it comes to latency. fills can take 10-20 minutes, literally. lightspeed is a 'direct access' broker meaning you get routed directly to pools, you can even pick which pools you want your order routed to. not a single transaction ive performed on lightspeed took over 1 second to fill.
+ the software is clean af. its designed primarily to run on windows. hilariously they have a mac version thats nothing but the windows version running under wine (i swear to god this is true) but per their own support staff, they suggest just running it on windows. but ive had no memory issues, bloat issues, nothing. its like a stealth fighter cockpit with all the data coming at me but all of it is data i deliberately wanted in front of me. but yeah if you want to open/close positions with literal hotkeys & hotbuttons, this is the only game in town.
- the software is extremely complicated / advanced. this is basically designed for professionals and as such there isnt a lot of built in hand holding. so its incredibly easy to make expensive mistakes if you dont have everything set up exactly how you need it.
- its expensive. sorry but it just is. theres a monthly fee of around $130 plus the contract fees and believe me they add up. that said, when you have zero latency concerns, that precision buys you a percent or two of fill targets which can easily cover the contract fees.
- some of the bells and whistles it appears to not bundle with are stuff like ToS's scanner, scripting, backtesting, and studies. so i set up two monitors; top monitor is ToS, bottom is lightspeed. i use the top monitor to sort out entry points / validation and execute in lightspeed. shits slick tbh. but i do have some grave concerns about what im going to do if/when ToS gets nuked by schwab. i dont know why but i cant stomach web based brokers and the idea of trusting them with studies is really hard to trust fall into. may have to tho because schwab is definitely fucking up with ToS from what i hear.
+ another interesting point is that i wired money into my account on a tuesday night and by wed morning it was settled and available.
- and it was a lot of money because lightspeed has a 10k minimum and will literally want documentation on your finances if you try to open up a day trading account with 25k. also as a side note i deliberately requested a cash account and ended up being assigned like 4x margin. i called up the next morning to get that addressed and the next day it was sorted. thats really good customer service, is what that is.
so yeah honestly if you have the cash and it suits your needs, lightspeed is just kinda stunning, but be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort getting it tuned to your preferences. god its worth it tho.