Skip to main content
Like the Alpaca version of this question, this one starts with a correction: Anthid and Lightspeed are not competitors. Lightspeed is a brokerage, and a serious one. Anthid is managed trading infrastructure that connects to brokers, and Lightspeed is one of them. So the real choice is whether you write code against Lightspeed’s API directly or run your strategy through Anthid with Lightspeed behind it.

​
What Lightspeed gives you

Lightspeed built its name on active and professional traders, and it shows. Lightspeed publishes equities and ETFs from $0.001 per share, options from $0.20 per contract, futures through its eFutures subsidiary, extended hours access, and smart routing aimed at execution quality. Its API product, Lightspeed Connect, comes with a certification environment for paper trading and market data through Polygon.io. Expect a margin account minimum around $30,000, which tells you who this broker is for: people trading real size who care about fills. That caliber of execution is exactly why Anthid connects to it.
Lightspeed sets those terms and can change them, so confirm the current rates and minimums with Lightspeed rather than with us. What Anthid routes to Lightspeed today is narrower than Lightspeed’s full product: four order types, DAY time in force, and smart or direct exchange routing. Extended hours is not routable through the intent API on any broker yet. See Supported Order Types, Supported Time In Force, and Supported Destinations.

​
What direct integration leaves on your plate

Lightspeed Connect gets your orders to the market. What it does not do is run your operation for you. Once you are live, you own the machinery around every order: catching rejections, retrying failed submissions, surviving dropped connections without losing fills, and reconciling your book against the broker when the two disagree. You own your safety rails too. A daily loss cap or a position limit only exists if you wrote it, and it only saves you if it fires in time. And everything you write bakes in Lightspeed’s formats, order states, and quirks. That code is loyal to one broker. It will not follow you anywhere else.

​
Where Anthid fits

Anthid sits between your strategy and the broker. You describe the outcome you want as an intent instead of babysitting raw orders, and the platform handles retries, failures, reconciliation, and each broker’s quirks. Events from Lightspeed arrive in the same normalized stream as events from any other connected broker and land in a durable historical ledger, so your records have one shape and one home. Risk controls run before an order leaves: trading windows and order size limits enforced by the platform, not by a script you hope you tested.
Maximum daily loss and maximum position size can be configured today, but they are stored rather than enforced: the pre-trade evaluation checks order size alone. Keep those checks in your own application until Controls Overview says otherwise.
The platform runs at 99.99% uptime with median order acknowledgement of 42ms, and someone else carries the pager.
Those numbers describe how the platform has been running, not a commitment. Both connected broker integrations are in beta, and a broker integration carries no service level commitment. See Service levels.

​
The part people miss

Here is the quiet advantage of putting Anthid in front of Lightspeed: you stop having to choose one broker forever. Alpaca and Lightspeed are both connected today, and adding either is a config change. Plenty of teams start on Alpaca while they are small, then move size to Lightspeed as execution quality starts to matter, or run both at once for redundancy. Direct integrations make that a rewrite. Anthid makes it a line of configuration, and your strategy code never notices.
One thing to check before you make that move: Lightspeed honors DAY today, while GOOD_TILL_CANCEL, IMMEDIATE_OR_CANCEL, and the auction instructions are Alpaca only. A strategy built on those values needs them reviewed before it points at Lightspeed, because Anthid rejects an unsupported combination rather than routing it. See How to add a second broker without a rewrite.

​
So which should you pick?

If you have the engineering bench to build and staff a production integration, and you are certain Lightspeed is your broker forever, going direct is a defensible choice. But if you want Lightspeed’s execution without building a trading operations team around it, put Anthid in front. You keep the broker’s strengths and shed the plumbing. The test costs nothing. Anthid’s free tier includes paper trading with no credit card and no sales call, so you can prove out the strategy first and bring Lightspeed’s account minimum into the picture only when you are ready to trade real size.

Lightspeed Connect integration

What the Lightspeed integration supports today, including its broker limits.