Lime Brokerage, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wedbush Inc. that caters to the high-frequency crowd, announced that its new pre-trade risk offering adds less than 250 nanoseconds of latency.
The pre-trade product, dubbed LimeDirect, is a hardware and software system designed to support compliance with the recently enacted Securities and Exchange Commission market access rule 15c3-5. The rule mandates all orders must go through pre-trade risk checks before being executed.
According to Dave Polen, managing director of the systematic trading division at Lime, the faster the pre-trade risk check, the faster an order can be routed and executed.
"We went in beta in November and have seen tremendous interest," Polen said. "We hope for a high adoption rate, as we feel we’ve solved the latency question."
Newer pre-trade risk checks, Polen said, add around one to three microseconds to an order’s latency. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second, while a nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.
He added that the system is compatible with Lime’s other products and allows traders to use their existing market drivers. It also allows them to manage market connectivity and add new order types at will, upon approval of the sponsoring broker.
"This is geared toward our clients who need the lowest latency possible," Polen said.
