Lightspeed Trading, LLC, Professional Trading Solutions, Inc., and Lime Brokerage, LLC, have combined their household brokerage businesses in a potentially big shake-up of the U.S market.
The firms today said that they have executed an asset purchase agreement to create a new parent company of combined businesses, with sponsorship from an investor group.
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The collaboration is important as it will combine the advanced trading capabilities of each venue to the benefit of domestic and global traders in the futures and Equities space. Financial details were not disclosed.
Lightspeed Trading, a FINRA and NFA member, is headquartered in New York City and provides brokerage services to professional traders, proprietary trading firms, and hedge funds. The firm’s client base covers traders of stocks, options, futures, and ETFs through its Direct Market Access(DMA) technology.
Lime Brokerage LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wedbush, Inc., is an agency brokerage firm known for its ultra low-latency and trading technologies serving high frequency traders.
If the move goes ahead, which is expected to close by the end of Q1 2018, pending regulatory approval, it would see the birth of one of the biggest brands in the US brokerage market.
The focus of this initiative is both global and domestic, emphasizing equity markets via one unified platform offering. By extension, advanced Clearing services will be provided through Wedbush for all asset classes.
The combined firm will help garner multiple benefits for market participants, including trading synergies, better pricing and fees, market access and data. In addition, the inclusion of Lime will enable the parent firm to expand its offering of collocated direct-market access (DMA) platforms, executions in multiple asset classes and offer tighter integration with its clearing services.
Commenting on the deal, Farid Naib, Lightspeed CEO, stated: “Lightspeed and Lime are both respected brands and leaders in the active trader industry. The combination of these two firms provides a world-class set of services to active, high volume, and algorithmic traders, among others. Lightspeed and Lime share the same culture of, and have invested heavily in, providing clients with superior service, and best-of-breed systems.”
