Last thing I heard about Lime was that you needed a few million to open an account. So no.. The person I talked to might have had me pegged as a piker, because everybody seems to get a different story. I don't think what I'm doing is particularly latency sensitive, but faster may help. Somebody told me a few months ago that IB were setting up a server in Equinix, but I haven't heard anything since. Do you use Lime?
How do you take advantage of being colocated? You can't send orders directly to the exchange w/o going thru a broker can you? Unless you are a broker?
Lime Brokerage has three divisions: Lightspeed, eFutures, Lime. Lightspeed targets active traders that are either retail, RIAs or hedge funds/family offices/fund of funds. Our minimums are higher than online brokers but not high. Our DMA software requires $25,000 or more. PMA $175,000 (I suggest $30K and $200K). eFutures takes small retail futures accounts. Lime only offer PM, requires $1mm but this is a hosted ultra low latency offering with non-display data fees, hosting costs and ultra fast access. This solution is not aimed at retail account and a typical customer is another Broker dealer, Prop firm, hedge fund or family office.
I don't believe this was true before, did this happen after the Lightspeed merger. BTW, thanks for answering ... Was hoping you would.
That is my understanding and the Lime division is still operating as before. We can offer accounts now that use Lightspeed-me, but sign up for their ultra low latency offering for hosting and routing. That would require our minimums not theirs.
To be clear, i’m Happy to talk to or email correspond with any member or those that just read the posts. That is why I offer my direct contact information below. I always keep all communications private.
Update: I just conducted a test using Good After Time / Good Till Time orders. The idea is that since the processing is all done on IB's side, the variable of my own ping to IB is eliminated. My methodology is as follows: 1) Choose 100 stocks with wide spreads in postmarket. 2) Submit orders 1c inside the spread, Good After Time X, Good Till Time X + 10 seconds. 3) Look for my quotes on the tape, and note when the price changes (Y) and changes back (Z) 4) Calculate statistics for Submit (Y-X) and Cancel (Z-(X+10)) results (all numbers in milliseconds): Submit: min: 26.0, median: 123.0, mean: 147.9, max: 384.0, std. dev 119.8 Cancel: min: 1.0, median: 2.0, mean: 1.9, max: 3.0, stddev: 0.7 Clearly canceling is much, much faster than submitting. The fact that submitting is slower on average than what other people noted (for regular orders instead of Good After Time) in this thread is suspicious, possibly indicating that the Good After Time system goes through a different, slower path. In the future I plan to test submitting from my own system to see what I can get. I may also contact IB to ask why Good After Time is so slow, IMO a mean 147ms / stddev 119ms for submit is not acceptable.
The consolidated tape. SMART Primary routing. I would never use directed orders with IB due to the extra fees. Also I just realized I didn't have "don't route to darkpools" checked so I will repeat the experiment tomorrow and post again in case that makes a difference for submit time.
Right, but how do you know your market data provider is not causing the latency? I assume you are not getting raw multicast.