Lugene Forte is the CEO of Score Priority Corp, a financial technology and brokerage firm.
What was the highlight of 2021?
2021 was a pivotal year for Lime, a division of Score Priority. We integrated our team and technology into our new parent company, Score Priority, and continued to deliver a fast and reliable DMA platform for our quantitative customers during periods of high volatility. In 2021, our customers executed over 20 billion shares and our technology processed over 10 billion messages (100 million messages in one day alone) with no outages. Even during critical moments, our technology proved reliable enough to provide full access to the marketplace to our customers.
In addition to what Lime accomplished in 2021, another highlight for the year was attending the STA National Conference in DC and seeing so many people from our industry face to face again. As we continue to adjust our professional and personal lives during the pandemic, everyone with whom we engaged at the conference was so happy to be together again, and it gave us a sense that despite all that we have gone through over the past two years, things can return to normal again.
What are your expectations for 2022?
We are recognizing a gap in the marketplace which Lime is perfectly positioned to bridge. We are actively speaking with quants who are finding themselves looking for a more robust DMA technology, but these quants are also not large enough to be a customer at a major bank. A major advantage of Lime is the flexibility of our technology and the support we offer, so our customers can use a number of low latency gateways to meet their needs. We expect to see a continued migration by electronic traders away from the traditional firms to leverage Lime’s low latency direct market access gateways, which is great for fostering more competition in the marketplace.
What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
We feel the SEC’s decision to decentralize the SIP will be a big driver in offering a low-cost, consolidated market data feed to the industry. It may take some time for this to play out, but this could be a big event for the industry in helping to reduce the cost for market data.
What are your customers’ pain points and how have they changed from 1 year ago?
The hardest part of my job continues to be talking with our quantitative customers about the cost for market data. Although NASDAQ does a great job of offering a low-cost market data solution through their managed data services offering, the other exchanges don’t offer much of a discount for their normalized data versus what they are charging for raw data. The high cost for normalized market data is something for which we are hoping the industry can find a solution, and perhaps having competing SIP’s will solve that issue.
System response may vary due to multiple factors including but not limited to trading volumes, market conditions, system performance, and other factors.
