If you can fund an account at www.interactivebrokers.com you can get the CME exchange fee for $1.25 and use their free datafeed, if you do not like the IB TWS mosaic charts, and then use www.ensignsoftware.com www.sierrachart.com or www.ninjatrader.com for charts. I think you have to pay another low exchange fee to get the DOM/level 2 from interactivebrokers. Significant savings on exchange fees if you have a funded futures account. The IB universal account is both a futures and stock account so you do not have to trade futures to get the CME realtime datafeed. You could stay in cash or invest in stocks. Once the account is open you can take most of the money out.
v12 of esignal not metastock. It is very smooth though twice the price of CME/barcharttrader/sierrachart/ensign. Try it while you have an esignal account in another account/username on windows. You may find you do not need metastock as esignal v12 will do the charting you want.
Got a couple of IBs telling me to check out Multicharts as "closest to MetaStock" in charting capability. Anybody using? Like it?
I will sell you my copy for half price. I use IB TWS mosaic. Do you want to write systems in easylanguage? Will work with esignal, rithmic or IB datafeed. What rithmic software do you use at the moment?
I don't code. K.I.S.S. guy, here. Surprised to hear you say that. I find... if MetaStock is a "10" for charts, IB TWS is only about 4-5. What about Multicharts do you not like? I execute with R-Trader and Fidelity ATP. I tried R-Trade Pro/charts... didn't like it much. Charts too cumbersome.
I don't dislike it. Just find IB TWS mosaic adequate for my needs. Multicharts did use to be slow to get data from IB but they fixed that problem some time ago. I would say esignal 12 charts are as good if not better than metastock. The scanner in esignal 12 is very good and you can link it to the chart windows so you can click on a scanner result and see the intraday, daily, weekly and monthly charts instantly. As you have a futures account you should only have to pay $1.25 for CME data instead of $40 in all the examples I listed above.
Ask your broker if they have www.cqg.com/products/cqg-qtrader You could replace rtrader with qtrader. It is $40 a month but will only display one chart at a time. Has trading from the dom and chart. You have to click on quotes or change layouts to see other charts. Cqg have the best charts.