Hi Robert, curious if you could tell us what it was like when Lightspeed and Lime merged and now they split again? (The reason is because my first job was at Lime a long long time ago before the merger and curious how the whole thing went down and then split again).
I joined lightspeed trading in 2016. Lightspeed Trading was owned by a private equity group that also owned Sterling Trader Tech. Lightspeed Trading was sold to the Lime Division of Wedbush Securities, separating it from the private equity group that owned us, and Lime from direct ownership of Wedbush. Lime was an independent BD mostly owned by Wedbush. The Lime business focused on the institutional, high frequency, low latency businesses that either hosted at one of the New Jersey data centers or through a cross connect, or through a VPN. This type of business has lower margins and requires a lot of volume and infrastructure. The Lightspeed business was materially larger, and it was a business decision to focus on retail customers. To do that, management sold the Lime business to another broker dealer. Now we focus on solutions for small and medium-sized Hedge Funds, Trading Groups and Active Traders. We offer several trading platforms that also have APIs. I hope sometime next year, we will have a retail type version of the Lime Gateway that automated traders can connect to without the need for the desktop software, but I have no eta on that. IMO, management went the right direction.