If you do have an extra $5K you don't need in your IB account, you could open an account with Global Access Financial Services. You can get free data at 15 trades (at $10/trade is only $150). Level 2 is good, but charting is not nearly as good as eSignal, Real Tick or most other platforms.
I'm currently using AIQ TradingExpertPro for r/t and EOD charts so just looking for L2. Mytrack L2 is $50 /mth and awkward to use. Will look into Datek - $10/mth for L2 and a data source for Quotetracker. Spike
I keep a small account($5K) at DATEK and use there level II quotes accessed through Medved's quotetracker. Cost for the level II is $10/month. Cost for the quotetracker charts, free.
spike.usa DATEK doesn't, but this is not a problem since quotetracker gets the DATEK feed, you can open as many LEVEL II screens as you want in quotetracker.
jperl - nice one! Thanks. How long does it take to open an intraday chart in Quotetracker using Datek for backfill? Spike
spike.usa Quotetracker receives data for the charts from Datek's streamer in real time. So if you start at say 8:00 AM, you get real time chart action starting at 8:00. If you start at 1:00 PM then your chart data starts at 1:00 PM. There is no backfill from DATEK. So if you need the earlier data, you can backfill from quote.com onto the same chart. This is free also if you register first with quote.com.