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?.
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
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
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.
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.
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.