Co-location near LD4 or NY4 starts at $100/month. Specialised software is widely available. The infrastructure barrier is essentially gone.
Which means the only real line of defence a broker has today is detection speed.
Here's the problem: arbitrageurs know this too. Modern setups use behavioural masking — randomised delays, noise trades, distributed IPs — specifically designed to look like a normal client. At the individual trade level, everything appears legitimate. The pattern only becomes visible at tick resolution, in real time, across multiple accounts simultaneously.
Most dealing desk systems aren't operating at that resolution.
This isn't a strategy problem. It's a risk monitoring infrastructure problem.
If your dashboard shows data in minute-level snapshots, latency arbitrageurs are already several steps ahead.
👉 See what real-time detection looks like in practice: brokerpilot.net
