Lightspeed vs Interactive Brokers: Trader’s Choice
If you trade or invest in different markets or just want to buy stocks for your IRA, you have to choose the best brokers to fulfill all your requirements. The best brokers are the ones who save your time and expenses and guide you in a better and easy way to understand the algorithms of trading. Understanding and knowing the needs of an investor/trader helps you zero in on the right broker which is best fitted for your investment and guides you well, whether you need a stockbroker, an online broker, or a forex broker that allows users to trade or invest in multiple markets with various benefits.
If you are an active trader or investor the two of the broker services offer you to trade, the one is a lightspeed broker and the other is an interactive broker. Both the broker services platforms provide investors with competitive prices, hedge-fund-style, and low latency trading. Moreover, both companies are looking to serve similar niche markets, and various other features of each company are a little bit different according to their customer’s requirements.
We have examined two of the best online brokers serving in multiple markets and giving traders a platform where they invest easily. Lightspeed vs interactive brokers, both are highly rated and popular trading platforms used for trading by different traders.
Here in this article, we have collected all the information which is the best use for any trader or investor to differentiate between these two trading platforms. After reading out all the details of these two trading platforms you will be able to decide which of these two will best fit your choice or needs.
1. Lightspeed Brokers
Lightspeed is a professional platform for those professionals who want to trade high-volume stock and options for their future investments. Lightspeed trading platform is used by various professional traders, day traders, trading group institutions, and hedge-out funds interested in equities, and options for their upcoming future markets.
This trading platform offers various options of trading, including the flagship lightspeed trader, lightspeed web & mobile, a sterling trader for professionals-which is the full-featured trading platform having the option of advanced charting with level II service.
Other platforms are also included such as sterling VolTrader (previously known as LiveVolX which is used for advanced trading) and Eze EMS (previously known as RealTick which is used to support only futures trading). RealTick is the only lightspeed platform that works in favor of futures trading.
The main core of lightspeed’s trading platform is that it provides exceptional order execution. While compared with the industry-wide push to zero-commission trading impacted lightspeed’s retail growth, many company representatives say its core customers and target market understand the value and benefits of active day trading services and the technology that provides for future growth. For a better understanding of the lightspeed broker’s platforms, we will go to depth look to help you to decide if the lightspeed trading platform is the best fit for your trading needs.
Advantages
- Lightspeed offers advanced multiple trading platforms depending what are your availability requirements.
- Lightspeed’s speed order router works very fast. It uses to work with proprietary algorithms which are designed to produce the best execution by rotating and using multiple routes.
- Those who used lightspeed will start the work with as minimum as low amount they have such as $0.001 per share and $2.50 equities per trade.
Disadvantages
- The starting funding requirement for lightspeed user accounts is $25000 and the minimum is $10,000 for WebTrader accounts.
- Those users whose accounts fall under $15,000 in value will be charged a $25 per month maintenance fee.
- This platform is not suitable for novice traders.
Interactive Brokers
Was established in 1993, by chairperson Thomas Peterffy. Interactive brokers have a streamlined perspective toward brokerage services that focus on broad market analysis, minimum costs, and good trade execution. Interactive brokers are well organized and capitalized and publicly traded, IBKR has more than two million client accounts and the daily traded value is $1.9 million. This broker platform gives a competitive and transparent fee plan with a rock-bottom edge in prices. On the other hand, with the breadth of assets and complex tools and instruments, it requires time to wade through the price guidelines to navigate this platform.
The company regularly added innovations to the platform, they recently added cryptocurrency access and fractional shares trading for the United States and European stock traders. The impact is a big initiative to provide investors with many new chances to trade companies based on social, environmental, and governance learnings at a granular level based on their conditions.
Lastly, they provide the GlobalTrader app is a boon for international traders who are seeking a space of mobile access to markets. Multiple new features are regularly added to the IBKR trading platforms for investors to make trading easy for every individual. IBKR is an exceptional platform for professional traders who are looking for higher selection choices of order types to execute trading strategies.
The traders will also appreciate the breadth of assets to grow their educational and research learning skills. This platform is the best for those who want to start their journey as these brokers are the best suited for novice traders as compared to expert traders, additionally, IBKR offers more services and products to their new traders.
Advantages
- The users of this platform have a wide range of availability of investment assets.
- The order execution in this platform is superior.
- They have low commission and margin rates in terms of money.
- Wide range of fundamental and technical tools for users to make trading easy.
- This platform offers an unparallel range of trading assets such as ETFs, futures, options, cryptocurrencies, mutual funds, hedge funds, Robo-advisor, and many more services. This platform also has the ability to manage your portfolio.
Disadvantages
- The first disadvantage of this platform is that IBKR’s smart router service is not available for IBKR lite customers.
- The platform can be intimidating for fresh investors.
Research Comparison: Lightspeed vs Interactive Brokers
Lightspeed Brokers
Lightspeed gives access to clients of its web trader feature, a free market data which offer a wide range of research package. The research facilities included in this platform are real-time levels I data such as AMEX, NYSE, OPRA, and NASDAQ Dow Jones indexes for approved options trading accounts. They also allow news feed and charting capabilities options in the dashboard of the platform. The subscription charge of the Lightspeed package is just $105 for 30 days for professional users.
Interactive Brokers
Interactive brokers offer research and news-checking subscription facilities on their platforms. They can offer these services through interactive brokers information system (IBIS), a detailed add-on added to the TWS platform for news and fundamental research, they offer free research offerings including full-day wall street, crypto news, and AccessWire.
In addition to a massive area of these paid subscription data bundles, interactive brokers offer premium newswires by a la carte subscription which includes Argus, Accern, and most importantly Asbury Research Monthly Investment Compass which is used to track your full monthly details in the platform.
Experience of Trading: Lightspeed vs Interactive Brokers
1. Mobile Experience
Lightspeed’s trading platform offers mobile services to their customers similar to the desktop trading experience. Users have the time to access the real-time streaming data and their account details, but they don’t have the most powerful analytics that is built into the desktop platform. While most traders or investors can trade their options and equities via mobile. The availability of trading futures is not possible for mobile app users.
Similarly lightspeed mobile trading platform, Interactive broker also offers trading on mobile apps. You can compare the mobile app with computer-based trading due to the mobile app has the built-in capacity to trade. Mobile trading apps offer similar research capabilities and tools as the desktop client portal offers to their clients for making trading for all. IBKR offers a streamlined version of its mobile app which is IBKR Global Trader.
Because of the superior mobile functionality offered with a full array of asset types, IBKR has a better margin when it comes to the mobile trading experience for trading.
2. Range of services offered by these two platforms
Lightspeed offers minimum fee transactions with high speed for traders, while the company offers more than 100 routing destinations and the margin rate is about 5%. The services they offer are as follows;
- Options.
- Cryptocurrencies trading.
- Futures trading
- Stocks or ETFs
Interactive brokers only allow traders to fund their accounts with 24 cryptocurrencies and have the option to trade any product in a different currency. The services they offer are as follows;
- US Spot Gold.
- Hedge funds.
- Options.
- Bonds.
- Stocks or ETFs.
- Spot currencies.
- Mutual funds.
- Cryptocurrency trading.
The Bottom Line
Both the lightspeed and interactive brokers offer minimum latency trading platforms for their users. Lightspeed vs interactive brokers both is good in their own areas. Overall, we see that the interactive brokers have the edge on lightspeed and offer you a variety of services. Interactive brokers stand out in almost all the cateries in comparison to lightspeed vs interactive brokers. From the start til the end, interactive brokers dominate the whole comparison between lightspeed vs interactive brokers. The lightspeed brokers still have a niche with the largest volume traders seeking low-cost investment, but every individual finds IBKR’s market breadth and trading capabilities beyond their needs.