Why havent u considered Refco? $5 rt ($15 for the pit - depending on monthly volume). Largest non bank broker Never heard anything bad about them. Either way, ALL brokers r out 2 screw u.
Openecry I've been with for about 4 months now and overall they are excellent datafeed commissions day trade margins Platform Customer service They've had about 3-4 issues with their datafeed since i've been with them. These were all handled within an hour. They used to allow us 100 symbols for free. Then the limited it to 25, but now it's at 50. So you can monitor up to 50 markets (dom, quoteboard, trading, charts combined) simultaneously. the DOM and phone orders were still available at that time. The quotes mostly affected the quoteboard and charts. The only main negative is their charting platform. Not so much that there isn't a lot of indicators (there aren't), but the way that the indicators are being caluclated. Particularly the Exponential Moving average. One of my methods relys on this and my teacher and I would discuss trades and I found out that I was in many trades he would not have taken because the adverages were drawn wrong! OpenEcry and I spent hours on the phone and we worked it out. They still have to update this. So I just use SierraChart with Transact feed. I have the OEC trader dom opened up whenever I'm ready to place a trade. The platform takes up very little memory. The trade-on-the-chart deal is cool, but I've stayed away from it for the reasons stated above. I had to get used to the DOM which is actually nice. I find it slim and intuitive. bid and ask on seperate sides, alerts in the middle, mouseover tooltips so that you avoid making a stop or limit. Buys and sell open orders are monitored on seperate sides as well. They show the OCOs for your stop loss and limit orders, or you can create your own OCO right on the dom/chart by holding the SHIFT key. In other words, they used common sense when they built the dom. Much more attractive than TransActs AT dom (it's thick width-wise, and buy/sell orders are on one spot) ZERO platform fees. And if you can write to the API, then you can grab their datafeed for FREE. I'm patiently awaiting for MultiCharts and SierraChart to complete their programming (1-2 more months I believe). Yes! I joined them before they had all those tutorials, so you newbies got lucky. Day trading margins are awesome. At least 1/2 of the exchange margins. 500 on most of the e-mini indexes. $1500 us for the FDAX!! What I like about this is that everyone gets this and you don't have to be a special customer to get these margins. I think you have to have $2k in your acct. Another negative is that currently they do NOT offer the Euronext (liffe)products. Only the US futures and the liquid Eurex futures. They are working on it. Commissions are competitive. I only trade the US markets, but usually get 5-7 RoundTurn for most electronic markets (gold is $8). Commissions are negotiable. I wasn't trading anything for about 2 months and I still got those rates. Make sure you get the rate promise in writing (email or pdf).
I just signed up with Global Futures, I'll report my experiences. So far teh customer service team is bending over backwards to give me GREAT rates and work out Specific platform Issues I have. When this is done and the platform I want works, I'll report in detail...