QuestraderWeb with quotestream. Maybe I should try pro? Since at first I'm not going to actually automate trades, but just automate alerts I thought about running the platform through a proxy to create my own quote feed. Wonder if pro has true streaming quotes.
Rufus - I thought you had to be a registered business with one of the big Canadian investment registries (I forget the name) before getting access to trade with them...
I think that NxCore sells whole-market L1 (NBBO and execution) feeds for most Canadian exchanges. Not sure how much it would cost through them, maybe somewhere between $500 and $1000 per month, depending on what you wanted (see http://www.nxcoreapi.com/Symbols/). The API is quite nice for automated trading, in my opinion.
For the record, I am a member of CME and Eurex, and frankly the membership process to become members of those exchanges are, how do I put it? Trivial. From what my attorney is telling me, the TMX participant has to be registered with IRROC (?), which is basically the canadian version of NASD, and there are known tricks to become a registered broker / dealer in the US quickly (weeks instead of *years*). I imagine similar backdoors exist in Canada as well. Granted, we are talking about a fair bit of upfront investment here (since you can always just sell your seat). A NYSE seat cost what? 2.5M these days, and it is not a sunken cost.
K thanks- That aside, IMO liquidity on Canadian stocks is the pits.... If I were automated, I were likely be in a bigger sea than the TSX..
not so!!! You can open a TSFA with any discount brokerage and make as many trades as you want. You might have trouble day trading because of the time(3 days) it takes to settle.
The Canadian model is based on NASD... But there is nothing "trivial" about being an NASD member... The entire system is geared to regulate retail brokers that deal with public Customers... So an independent trader becomes subject an onerous administrative load... And you will get a new Examiner roughly once per year... Who may ignore you or may spend 100 hours looking up your asshole. That's why Bernie Madoff registered as on Investment Advisor... The NASD Broker-Dealer run by his sons was under a focking microscope. You are also locked into an exclusive annual contract with a Clearing Firm... And your Clearing Firm is definitely not your friend. I owned a US Broker-Dealer for 7 years and shut it down in 2005... best move I ever made. To make a long story short... You are extremely unlikely to trade cheaper than IB in Canada no matter what you do... No Clearing Firm will give you a better deal because they don't have to... You should be trading ETFs for free (with rebates)... and everything else at < $0.003/share. The OP's stated business goal is to go head-to-head with Goldman and the like... So best of luck to him with that one.
For Canadian stocks trading TD Active Trader is cheaper than IB, $7 CAD all in, nothing else. Their platform (TD Active Trader) is the same of Questtrade, Disnat, BNS and others in Canada.... Hard to beat TD at 7Cad but they don't offer automated trading... Nobody beats IB in Canada if your thing is US stocks or eMinis.. Cheers