IB is very suitable for trading ES with either TWS or BookTrader and execution is very fast on market orders. One thing to consider, for 50 ES RTs a day you can get a lower commission rate at a broker like TransAct.
I use IB and find them very easy to trade the ES, stocks, stock options, and future options. When you say '50 ES contracts' do you mean at one time? If so, why would one trade 50 ES instead of 10 units of the regular S&P contracts? I'm not trading at that size yet but I have thought that I would trade 2 S&P contracts when I reached the level of trading 10 ES contracts. Are there reasons why I shouldn't plan on doing this?
oh no!!! 50 contracts during the course of the day, that's it are you able to customize your order entry to buy with oly one click?... let's say that you want the F9 button to buy at the market
Yes, they are called Hot Keys. You have a choice of transmitting the order instantaneously or getting a confirmation screen before sending it.
As to why one would trade the mini? Volume, baby! You can get the daily volume figures off the CME website, but as an example, on Weds past, e-mini total volume was 1.6M contracts whereas the big contract only did 32K.
I setup bracket orders using a hot key. You can enter a trade with a preset stop and profit limit with one click. ~Mike