I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I hope I'm in the right place to get some advice. I'm looking for recommendations on broker/data feed/software setups that are working well for other strategy based traders out there. I've been using automated trading strategies on forex for a while now with Metatrader and am looking to expand to the futures market. But as far as operating costs I can see that the futures market carries much more overhead. Tradestation offers a complete package of what I'd like but they charge high software and data fees. I don't really day trade, my main strategy is a trend following system, so I've decided that if it saves me software fees I can follow my system manually and trade by hand. But I still need the ability to develop and backtest new ideas. One idea I had was to find a broker with low commisions and use Ninja Trader for backtesting and development (which is free). I'm not sure if there are any free futures data sources out there, though. I don't need real time data but I'd like to find as much historical data as I can. Thanks in advance for any advice you might have.