Lightspeed Order Flow Finra Violation Dissappointment, Suggestions?

qlai said:
Sorry, I just didn’t scroll far enough. So it says 2015-2016. So I guess it means they are clean now :).
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I believe Finra's issue was with misleading customers. Now Lightspeed clarifies that it can ignore your routing and use payment for order flow.

So they're clean in that they've added a note under the routing fees. Not that they no longer do payment for order flow.

It seems Centerpoint also have a somewhat similar clause but I'm not sure if that only applies to their Lite program.

But I guess those are the fastest options available...

Now to figure out which is better, and what order route is best.

Centerpoint also offer the ability to choose clearing house - which I assume only matters based on the size of the orders? Or does it affect execution speed too?.
 
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Then you heard from someone with a hidden agenda. With IB if you direct orders to a specific exchange then you get the order routed to that exchange. Forget the lite account, I don't even consider that. So, you heard wrong, plain and simple

Yogi88 said:
Thank you for your response.

I've heard contradictory things for Interactive Brokers. They were originally my first choice.

In the UK they do not offer a lite and a pro service, there's just one package as far as I know, and I've been told it's not recommended for scalping strategies, and it's not because the program is written in Java (because then you could just use DasTrader with it and pay a bit more) but more to do with the executions. In fact someone told me Trading212 had better fills than IB for him - and Trading212 is like Robinhood but for the UK. That put me off and I did more research.

Numerous youtube videos I've seen recommend against IB for scalping due to fills, including a video by warrior trading in 2019 where he talks about disastrous fills and why he will never use interactive brokers again - but if you go on his website to see the broker comparisons, and the part about payment for order flow and direct market access...the one he still has as his recommendation is IB.

Then again he also says Lightspeed uses direct market access and not payment for order flow, and we know that's not true either.

I would greatly appreciate input from someone who has compared a few of the better ones in recent times. I know it's asking a lot. And I may eventually have to compare a few myself but was hoping to hear the top recommendations.

And if anyone is still recently satisfied with Lightspeed when daytrading volatile stocks, even low floats and what they use for order routing.

Or any input about this in general, would love to hear more.

It all seems a bit hush hush, but what are we paying high comissions for exactly?

I've heard great things about Fidelity's execution speed. I think they internalise the orders instead of getting paid for it, but they're rated very highly in terms of speed and don't have comissions, or they're very low. But I'm not sure if it's the same for Fidelity International...or how professional their platform is.
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A) I have used them for close to 20 years and have hands on experience
B) I don't myself trade stocks but my colleague does run multiple algorithmic strategies via IB's Fix protocol. He always directs orders and often provides liquidity at specific exchanges
B) it's nowhere mentioned that IB sells order flows or internalized orders if you specify a direct route
D) to my knowledge they were never reprimanded by regulators because they violated direct routing when the customer chose to do so

Is that enough reason to make me be absolutely sure they don't cheat customers when a customer chooses to route directly? I know you don't like IB and that's fine but I don't care about my or your feelings, I care about facts. Happy to stand corrected if you can show me that it has been proven that they have sold order flow when a customer specifically chose not to


qlai said:
How do you know that for sure?
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DiceAreCast said:
Then you heard from someone with a hidden agenda. With IB if you direct orders to a specific exchange then you get the order routed to that exchange. Forget the lite account, I don't even consider that. So, you heard wrong, plain and simple
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Thank you I will keep them in mind, it's just I've heard it so many times now that their execution speeds are not that good compared to other brokers (particularly concerning for scalping strategies on volatile stocks). Too many times to ignore and some of the people I do trust and the comments were made this last month.

I was reading their documentation on payment for order flow and it doesn't seem that they do that in all situations and I'm not sure if Centerpoint or Lightspeed do either - they really need to clarify exactly what's going on - usually it's "contact us for more info" but just having that disclaimer that hey we can completely ignore your instructions doesn't seem good enough. They advertise direct market access.

I'll go into what IB says in more detail another time. It's here though I believe this is for IB US:

https://gdcdyn.interactivebrokers.com/Universal/servlet/Registration_v2.formSampleView?formdb=3074

I wasn't really impressed by the support section on IB UK as it seems to pull data from the US site, talking about a lite and pro version etc. It was pretty confusing. I can probably find the IB UK info somewhere, at the very least I expect when I sign up they'd mention it somewhere.


I was reading about the "filtered tick" comment that was mentioned earlier and it seems it's to do with the speed at which it updates. I'm not sure if that has an effect on executions or if it's just the data feed, but it seems to come in clumps at around 250ms, whereas lightspeed and others have unfiltered tick data so it streams in faster. I don't know if that's still the case.

I guess I might just have to try them all at some point.
 
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It's just the data feed, does not affect orders and executions.

Yogi88 said:
Thank you I will keep them in mind, it's just I've heard it so many times now that their execution speeds are not that good compared to other brokers (particularly concerning for scalping strategies on volatile stocks). Too many times to ignore and some of the people I do trust and the comments were made this last month.

I was reading their documentation on payment for order flow and it doesn't seem that they do that but I'll go into it in more detail. It's here:

https://gdcdyn.interactivebrokers.com/Universal/servlet/Registration_v2.formSampleView?formdb=3074

I was reading about the "filtered tick" comment that was mentioned earlier and it seems it's to do with the speed at which it updates. I'm not sure if that has an effect on executions or if it's just the data feed, but it seems to come in clumps at around 250ms, whereas lightspeed and others have unfiltered tick data so it streams in faster. I don't know if that's still the case.

I guess I might just have to try them all at some point.
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Perhaps I confused you with someone else who constantly bitches about IB.

qlai said:
How did you come up with that? IB is my only trading broker. But if you don’t trade equities, especially momo stocks, then you may not have relevant experience.
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Yogi88 said:
I was reading about the "filtered tick" comment that was mentioned earlier and it seems it's to do with the speed at which it updates. I'm not sure if that has an effect on executions or if it's just the data feed, but it seems to come in clumps at around 250ms, whereas lightspeed and others have unfiltered tick data so it streams in faster. I don't know if that's still the case.
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If you use TWS then it is indeed the case that incoming price data is sampled at 250 ms for stocks (see here: https://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/top_data.html). There is no sampling or forced delay for submitting order lines.
However, some time ago a new feature was added for those who write their own software and use IB's API. This provides a tick by tick data download stream. It is limited to only a few tickers in parallel at a time (for most customers: maximum 3). See here: https://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/tick_data.html . As far as I know does TWS not use this feature.
 
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