Lightspeed Trading Reviews (2025)

Review:  The trading platform is utterly useless, lacking both P/L data and unrealized gains. The charting features are extremely poor, and most importantly, there is absolutely no customer service. If you encounter any issues, no one will respond—even after weeks. It’s not a secure platform, and the high fees compared to industry standards make it one of the worst online brokers available.

Review:  Lightspeed is a complete joke. They seem to want you to lose money. The simple reason is that market makers and exchanges pay them more than they pay their customers who trade on their platform. Here are two examples: your P&L doesn’t show the percentage change of your positions, which is crucial since most people rely on this to gauge how their positions are performing instead of doing mental math for every trade. The second example is even more questionable. Imagine you have a list of positions where all are profitable—you can only see the value or net liquidity for the positions that are barely profitable, while the ones that are highly profitable don’t show their value. This inconsistency confuses people, and they’re fully aware of it. They also send confirmation reports late, creating confusion about the actual value of your positions. To make options trading even harder, you have to manually click everything you want to execute. On another brokerage platform, you might click 3-5 times, but on Lightspeed, you end up clicking 8-10 times. Obviously, this is designed to make things more difficult for you. I also had an experience where I closed all my trades at market without a confirmation while I was losing money—no problem. But when I did the same while I was in the green, I received confirmation windows and an error, forcing me to go back and click them individually. Odd timing, indeed.

More on what Lightspeed does and its philosophy:

They don’t see themselves as the caddie while you’re golfing. Instead, they believe they’re setting up the golf course and expect you to play by their specific rules, regardless of whether you’re frustrated with the platform’s difficulties. Most brokerages understand that they’re simply providing the tools to trade, not manipulating the trading experience.

Note my earlier comment that they don’t reveal the net liquidity or value of all your trades.

Additionally, the percentage change function is hidden and hard to find.

All their tabs are difficult to interpret in straightforward English, which is crucial for executing trades on their convoluted platform.

They don’t believe in accurate timing and distribution of statements or financial reports. They consider the trader’s experience as part of their own and reflect this by placing the burden on the trader to figure out their distribution schedules.

Example 1: They email you at 5 am EST saying your trading reports are available. When you click the link, there are no trading reports or confirmations until 8 am EST daily.

Example 2: You go flat on all your trades and request a check to withdraw funds. Then you receive an automated email, possibly generated automatically, about a margin call on your account after you’ve gone through the necessary steps and approvals to request a check.

Lightspeed needs to learn that, just because Wedbush has built a customer base in managing assets and facilitating trades, it doesn’t mean they are the caddie—they are not the house. People shouldn’t come to “play their game” but should expect to receive a service that respects the individual paying for it. Their manipulations, combined with higher costs compared to larger brokerages, are a shame and a hallmark of the deceptive practices that financial institutions use to extract money from customers and hide important information or make it inconvenient to access, thereby disadvantaging users compared to the exchanges they serve.

Bottom line: Making it difficult to see your positions and their value in the account, marking them as “.00” or being outright inaccurate, sending misleading messages about the timing of trade reports, and issuing margin calls after withdrawal requests are made is unethical in the practice of electronic brokerage. People deserve to always be aware of their positions, the actual timing of their statement distributions, and their true rights regarding the liquidity needed to trade or withdraw funds at any time.

Review:  Takes FFFFFOOOORRRRREEEVVVVEEERRRR to set up your account.
Executions no better than other platforms.
The web and mobile version are complete trash. Full of glitches and just flat out doesn’t work. Upgraded to Lightspeed platform which requires desktop to run. Took another week. Traded for a day and made $250. However they turned off my fading towards the end of the day and said my account wasn’t done being set up. Next day only the money I deposited and not my trading gains were in the account I’m sure if I had lost money it would have been the same! Platform is clumsy compared to literally everything else out there and not “Lightspeed” fast.
Biggest disappointment of my trading career.

Review:  Took almost 2 weeks for the application approval. No one ever answers the phone. And when they finaly did after multiple attemps... One guy did answered the phone and sounded like he was eating a sandwich and a bag of potato chips. Another guy sounded like he was too busy typing out a book and wasn't paying attention to my questions.

The platform seems quick in the demo state for scalping. But once you live live,... forget it. You try to buy in at say $1.82 and you execute the buy with your programmed hotkey and the damn thing buys it at $1.89 and the stock goes red at $1.88. BAM!!! You just got screwed! It happens with every execution no matter what settings or routing you try. It happens every damn time. There is no way that guy Ross Cameron is getting lightning fills right where he wants. Hell, I even tried typing in the exact amount I wanted it to execute and BAM... nope it still bought it almost 10 cents higher!

I'm totally done with Lightspeed!

Review:  Horrible customer service. There is no one to answer the phone at 4:00 am as they claim they open for trading. This happens almost daily.

Review:  When there are issues they appear to hide...My platform is down and no one answers the phone

Review:  After I got approved I got a letter saying they had checked my background and "because I was not able to get a FINRA license I would not be able to trade" I had already funded the account etc. Apparently you must have to have a perfect background to be able to work with these people. I finally got them to tell me what info they had on me and it was not my information very bad experience. Also I had traded with them in the past for 8 years.

Review:  I have been using Lightspeed for years now and absolutely love them. If you are a frequent and serious trader, you should find the functionality in Lightspeed perfect for your needs. LSTrader Platform is highly recommended.
Executions are lightning fast. You can choose either per trade ($4.50 per trade) or per share (highest rate is currently around 0.0045 per share and that pricing can be lower depending on how many shares you trade each month). Minimum commission per order is $1. Market fees add in about another $0.0035 per share.
Another plus to Lightspeed is the ability to receive rebates on market fees if you add liquidity rather than take liquidity.
Another thing I love about Lightspeed is the Customer Service. I have emailed my service rep Rob with almost every question imaginable and he is always very fast to respond. Their support desk is as well. Many other brokers won't allow you to email support.
As far as platform, trading, back office, customer support, and web tutorials, Lightspeed Excels.
The only drawbacks that I have found with Lightspeed is that it takes higher funding requirements, so it's not a broker for casual mom and pop traders with only a few bucks to their name. You will need at least $10k-$15k to open an account.
Another drawback is that data fees usually run about $10-$20 extra per month but with the money your saving in commissions, it kind of makes up for itself.
With LSTrader, you will also need to accumulate at least $100 in commission each month or pay the difference as a fee (say all your trades for April comes out to $50 in commission total, you would be charged the other $50 as a fee. If instead for the month of April you paid $105 in commissions, than you're ok and wouldn't be charged any extra fee).
All in all, I would highly highly recommend Lightspeed for any serious trader. Especially if you are a frequent trader. It is way better than overrated HF brokers like Interactive brokers in my opinion.

Review:  Incoming ACAT transfers are very slow at Lightspeed. It took them 2 weeks to complete a transfer in my IRA account. I know there was no issue with the transferring brokerage because a transfer of another account from the same originating brokerage to a 3rd brokerage was completed in just 2 days. This was the slowest account transfer I had ever experienced. Lightspeed claimed that it was due to the type of positions I had in my account. Their claim didn't make sense because the account only had stocks and call options in it.

After the transfer was completed, I found that their platform was inadequate for my needs. I was aware they did not have a mobile app, but I was hopeful that I would be able to use their Lightspeed Web Trader on my work computer and possibly on my Android phone. It turned out that the Web Trader requires Microsoft Silverlight to run. No where on the Lightspeed web site is this restriction mentioned. It turned out that the Web Trader would not run on my computer because my computer had IE 8 installed and Silverlight does not work with IE 8. So this along with the fact the Silverlight does not run on Android was a deal breaker to me.

In the end, Lightspeed was not a good match for me. I had to transfer my account out to another brokerage. Not only was this a waste of time, but it ended up costing me an extra $95 for my trouble.

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