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 routes 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 a broker API leaves on your plate
Lightspeed Connect gets your orders to the market. What it does not do is run the layer around them, because that is not a broker’s job. Once you are live, you own the machinery around every order: a record that the instruction existed before the broker answered, catching rejections, surviving dropped connections without losing fills, and reconciling your book against the broker when the two disagree. You own your safety rails too. A trading window or an order size 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 layer is loyal to one broker. It will not follow you anywhere else.What the layer does
Anthid sits between your strategy and the broker and runs that layer as a service. You describe the outcome you want as an intent instead of babysitting raw orders. Anthid records it in an append-only log in the same transaction that queues it, so no order reaches Lightspeed without a record. Dispatch state and fill state are reported separately, so sent is never mistaken for filled, and every replace and cancel is kept as sequenced history. Events from Lightspeed arrive in the same normalized stream as events from any other connected broker and land in a durable ledger kept for six years, 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, and every refusal recorded. 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. The connected broker integration is 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: the broker becomes a setting. The instruction, the controls, the stream, and the record are the same whichever connected account is behind them, so you stop having to choose one broker forever. Lightspeed is the broker connected today, and further integrations are on the roadmap. When one lands, adding it or running both at once for redundancy is a config change. A home-built layer makes that a rewrite. Anthid makes it a line of configuration, and your strategy code never notices.One thing to check before you point a strategy at Lightspeed: it honors
DAY today, and GOOD_TILL_CANCEL, IMMEDIATE_OR_CANCEL, and the auction instructions are not routed to it. A strategy built on those values needs them reviewed first, 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 an execution layer, 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 layer. 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.
CREATE instructions. They do not reevaluate replacements or cancel resting orders. HTTP create retries are not deduplicated; reconcile an uncertain submission before retrying. See Intents for the current contract.