I looked into that a while back (for a different reason) and the costs were actually higher than IB. My volume is almost 10x what it was then, so maybe it would be a different story now...but it was a pretty clear non-starter at the time.
for hf equities, yea their costs are high, and i've also never heard of any executing brokers being setup to clear them. so, you'd have to have some real flow for anyone to want to hassle setting that up.
For anyone interested, here are my roundtrip execution times for sending marketable orders via TWS API. I did 6 SMART routed and 6 direct routed. The figures measure the time from when my ATS sends the order until it receives an execution report from IB. This doesn't tell me a whole lot about how long it takes IB to receive and an order and place it on the exchange, but I suppose it's a starting point for worst case scenario. Also, I have "Seek Price Improvement" turned on - I would imagine the SMART times would come down a bit if I were to switch that off. My average ping time to gw1.ibllc.com is 7ms. SMART: 459, 465, 663, 248, 235, 452 Direct: 92, 241, 242, 242, 246, 247
You would need far more data for reliable statistics ... but your smart lag seems to be of the order I have ... Does anyone has measurements for iB with FIX ???
Sure, but I saw enough to discourage me from exploring this further (for the time being at least). I'll see how much pain is involved with setting up a FIX order submission. If it's not too bad, I'll re-run the tests holding everything else constant. The IB did rep acknowledge that FIX orders are processed more quickly than the other APIs.
One thing the OP is likely missing about Rithmic is their servers are in chicago. 250us might be correct if you are trading at the CME with a server in Aurora. Once I saw the CBOE was moving to NJ there was now another reason for Rithmic to put one server in the NJ area other than BATS, I asked publically a year ago if they would put a server in NJ. They did not reply. Anyone know if they have a server in NJ now ?