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Lightspeed is a relatively young US-based broker with offices in New York and Chicago. The broker works mainly with professional investors with large trading volumes.
The broker is licensed by reputable US regulators: Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and National Futures Association (NFA).
In addition, the company is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), which ensures the high level of security of funds.
Wedbush and Lloyd’s of London provides coverage for each client account. Each account is covered up to $100 million.
Trading conditions
The broker cannot boast of a wide array of trading instruments. The company offers its clients to trade futures, options, and stocks (mainly US companies). Trading of currency pairs, energy carriers, and metals is not available.
To open an account, traders need to make a minimum deposit of $10,000, which is a rather high initial deposit for many investors. The broker also charges high commission. For example, when trading options, it is up to $0.60 per contract, while for the stocks, it is up to $4.5 per transaction ($0.0045 per share). At the same time, Lightspeed encourages active traders. For clients with large monthly trading volumes, the commission is reduced by several times.
Some traders claim that the broker charges traders a commission for inactivity. However, on Lightspeed`s website, we did not find any information or warning of the broker on this issue.
Account types
Despite a high initial deposit, Lightspeed offers accounts for both professional and non-professional traders. Professional traders can choose from five account types, including a regulated account, a separately managed account, a CMTA agreement, and others. LLCs, individual accounts for hedge funds, and individual, corporate, joint, or trust accounts are available for all traders. American taxpayers can open an IRAs account (individual retirement account).
Training
Lightspeed is not the best choice for beginners. However, they can find a lot of training materials on the broker`s website, including recordings of regular live webinars.
The broker provides its clients with the opportunity to open a demo account.
Support service
Traders can contact the support service by phone and email, as well as fill out a feedback form on the website. Many customers praise the support team for the prompt response, especially to the phone call (within a minute). The broker focuses on the North American market and the support team speaks only English.
Moreover, the choice of language versions on the company`s website is limited. Currently, only English and Spanish are available. Clients who wrote their reviews in previous years also mentioned the Chinese language.
Deposit and withdrawal of funds
Customers can deposit and withdraw money only via wire transfer. There is a commission that differs for US residents and foreign citizens (as well as payment details). Withdrawal requests are approved on the day they are received.
Feedback
Many traders note that despite the broker`s willingness to work with non-professional traders, Lightspeed`s trading conditions are not suitable for novice traders. Apart from the high initial deposit, the company simply does not have anything that could attract the beginners (from educational materials on the website to the interface of the flagship platform). Poor language choice also spooks potential clients.
Advantages and disadvantages
Clients praise the broker mostly for user-friendly and high efficient flagship platform (speed and accuracy of operation), a wide selection of other platforms (one of the platforms is intuitive and easy to learn), prompt response from the support service, discounts for active traders, a great choice of account types, including a demo account.
Nevertheless, they complain about the limited choice of trading instruments, a small array of payment methods for depositing and withdrawing funds, the commissions for funds withdrawal, as well as a monthly fee for using the Lightspeed Trader platform.
