IB is dogshit for futures. It's useful if you're trading in equities & bonds as well. Good luck with trade support. VELOCITY is a great company for price-sensitve customers who want charts/ good front-end. Other than Velocity, I've always liked Dorman Trading & RJO.
The issues my clients have had with Velocity in the past at least is logging into more than one exchange at a time with a TT license. And spread traders need all kinds of exchange product access - multiple electronic market access on a simultaneous basis is our lifeblood.
Velocity gives cheap commissions. They also allow you to chart your P&L, let you know P&L per hour, W/L ratio, and some other stuff. If you don't care for that stuff, take a look a deep discount trading. The guy running it, Howard Lender, is very quick to respond to emails and any problems you might have. He has a ton of front ends that you can use and clears through Crossland llc. It is more for established traders though, so if you are asking about margin, I'm not sure you are at that point to be willing to be paying for front ends.
Yea, their "free" X-Trader is only one exchange at a time. You can get all the exchanges, but it will cost you a good chunk of change that smaller traders can't justify.
Actually, my clients lease TT or CTS on a transactional basis through a few different major Chicago FCMs. And it is a smoking hot deal. Nice to be subsidized by scalpers !
Why would they need to lease both tt and cts? Also, I'm not doubting that you have some larger clients. The futures business is quite large full of big money.