Not sure of the minimum to open an ac. But you can put it in say 5K then withdraw 4.9K after a couple of months then just do a couple break even trades a month .
How do you plan on paying the $99 platform fee PLUS exchange data fees with $100? You are goin' places!
No need to withdraw the money. If I'm saving around $50/month (the cost I estimate with eSignal - $99) then that's a 14% return on the 5k deposit. Not a bad deal. If their brokerage works out for me I wouldn't mind placing 10 trades but from what I hear it's a real dog and I'm better off at IB.
Of course. What about TS do you like/need? Because unless you need Radarscreen or have extensive EL code written already, I see no reason why you couldnt do nearly the same with Ensign, Sierra, Neoticker, Ninjatrader using IB's data or Iqfeed or some other feed and paying the same or less. Then again make 10 futures trades and you get a good platform for ~$70. Not bad. Just be leery of Fed Days. TS was at one time very, very good. Neglect has made it capable but not mandatory to your trading. Also if you go TS route DO NOT use version 8.3. Use 8.2 or lower. 8.3 was not throughly beta tested and eats cpu resources.
This is a good question and the truth is I'm not sure what I need from TS. I'm currently evaluating NinjaTrader & OpenQuant. So far I find NinjaTrader easier to use and I've been more productive with it. But I'm not sure if NinjaTrader provides everything that is provided with Tradestation? Could you tell me also, if I'm happy with NinjaTrader, would I be missing anything provided in Ensign, Sierre, or Neoticker? It's still not clear to me what each one includes. I really don't plan to do automated trading, I'm more interested in backtesting. And also charting. I like ninjatrader's superdom but it seems like BracketTrader offers something similar for free.. Finally, i'm not sure if IB's data feed is enough for me. It seems most professionals use eSignal or Tradestation for their feed.