ANSS
Ansys Inc
stock NASDAQ

Running algos for a while. Backtests looked great, live performance consistently underwhelmed. Blamed slippage, never questioned my actual order routing.
Then I fucked around and found out.
The experiment:
Two Lime accounts (not sponsored, wish I was)
Account A: Direct market access ($0.003/share)
Account B: Commission-free routing
Identical strategy on both
Results that hurt:
Same strategy on ANSS:
DMA: +10.2%
Commission-free: +3.0%
After paying fees, DMA was STILL getting me $0.065/share better pricing. That's 20x better than "free."
Plus the zero-commission route had 2x the latency spikes. When your edge is momentum or mean reversion, those delays don't just hurt - they kill your strategy entirely.
The part nobody talks about:
Commission-free isn't free. You're paying with your edge instead of cash, and you have zero visibility because brokers don't give you execution data.
Your orders vanish into a PFOF black box and you're supposed to just trust them while they trade against your flow.
Real talk:
How many of you are spending weeks optimizing backtests then dumping orders into mystery routing and praying?
We're sweating basis points in our Sharpe ratios while brokers quietly siphon 30-40% of our edge through trash execution.
If you're not tracking fill quality, you're not trading a strategy. You're making donations with extra steps.

Running algos for a while. Backtests looked great, live performance consistently underwhelmed. Blamed slippage, never questioned my actual order routing.
Then I fucked around and found out.
The experiment:
Two Lime accounts (not sponsored, wish I was)
Account A: Direct market access ($0.003/share)
Account B: Commission-free routing
Identical strategy on both
Results that hurt:
Same strategy on ANSS:
DMA: +10.2%
Commission-free: +3.0%
After paying fees, DMA was STILL getting me $0.065/share better pricing. That's 20x better than "free."
Plus the zero-commission route had 2x the latency spikes. When your edge is momentum or mean reversion, those delays don't just hurt - they kill your strategy entirely.
The part nobody talks about:
Commission-free isn't free. You're paying with your edge instead of cash, and you have zero visibility because brokers don't give you execution data.
Your orders vanish into a PFOF black box and you're supposed to just trust them while they trade against your flow.
Real talk:
How many of you are spending weeks optimizing backtests then dumping orders into mystery routing and praying?
We're sweating basis points in our Sharpe ratios while brokers quietly siphon 30-40% of our edge through trash execution.
If you're not tracking fill quality, you're not trading a strategy. You're making donations with extra steps.