Lime Brokerage

Lime Brokerage provided ultra-low-latency direct market access, smart order routing, and pre-trade risk management services for quantitative hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and algorithmic market-makers. The firm operated as a regulated broker-dealer but functioned structurally as a technology company, with its own custom-built order management system and exchange co-location facilities.

Lime was one of the earliest firms to treat exchange connectivity as a vertically integrated technology product rather than a brokered service. By owning its entire execution stack, Lime enabled clients to exploit microsecond-level advantages during the post-Reg NMS fragmentation of US equity markets, making it a foundational infrastructure provider for the modern electronic trading ecosystem.

Lime Brokerage was acquired by Wedbush Securities in October 2015. Wedbush absorbed Lime's broker-dealer entities, technology platform, and routing infrastructure, incorporating them into its clearing and execution division. The acquisition gave Wedbush a proprietary high-speed trading stack that it did not previously possess.

Lime Brokerage was led by CEO Jeff Bellick, who drove the firm's strategy of building proprietary technology to serve the quantitative and high-frequency trading community. Under Bellick's direction, Lime merged with Lightspeed Trading in 2011 before ultimately selling the combined entity to Wedbush Securities.

Lime built and maintained its own order-routing logic, exchange adapters, and risk-checking gateways rather than licensing third-party systems. This allowed deterministic, low-latency performance tailored to specific strategies, whereas most prime brokers offered generic, latency-variable access through vendor-supplied routing networks.