Not being a TS user for a long time now, I understand the only way to get TS data is for a chart/study/whatever to dump it to an ASCII file.
Tradestation includes it's own datafeed and will merge with a variety of others too. Yes, it will allow you to automate your trading strategy in Easy Language as well. They even hold free easy language courses so you can program your own system if you choose.
I believe you can get about 2 days of 1 minute intraday futures ( for ES and ER2 at least ) and more if you request daily. Depending on your needs this can be fine, but it is no good for back testing.
For IB data support, it is whatever # of days that IB provides. I think that is more than just 2 days. On the other hand, we have very long historical data in 1-minute resolution available for download if you are our client. It is pretty easy to merge both set of data (our historical data and data from IB) together for back testing.
i would love to know more about the EOD product.I demoed it and found it interesting but a bit difficult to implement... what makes you say its the best bang for thr buck???
Best bang for the buck because of: - excellent charting capabilities; - excellent programming capabilities; - excellent hook-up capabilities (I put my EOD data to a spreadsheet for review, then hit a hotkey and get the chart to view on Neoticker). The above looks like overstatement, but I really like it (I'm also using the RT version for currencies).