you have a number of things wrong... let's start with why the OP was going to RJO... I think that is self explanatory, nothing or little to do with retail rates... it had to do with the platform (CQGIC) being branded and offered for free by RJO to their clients and him having interest on getting it for free... with that clearly stated, let's move on to the second wrong point you have... the thread never had anything to do with "retail rates" but rather with how to get better rates from RJO via a direct relationship... and last one.... clearly, Eyez has member rates and a good comms... now, lowest member rate is ~45c and lowest comm is probably 1c (I say probably because I have never seen it, but more than likely someone with lots of volume has it) so assuming 92c lowest comm, $1.1 has a 16% impact on your P&L... so yes $1.10 can be thought of as expensive... and btw, you can in fact have member rates and still be retail... you can lease a seat as an individual ($100-$1250 depending on what one trades) and not have $1M account or none of that... not only that, you are not required to be registered... so the assumption that having a seat and being a member doesn't make someone "retail" is mistaken in the futures market... professionals, are hedgers & producers as well as funds & advisors (speculators)... anyone trading their own account (floor or on screen) unless a broker at the same time, is retail...
Do these commision rates the OP talks about at other firms lead you to believe he is pushing through thousands of contracts a month and has any form of exchange membership: "They are two to three times as expensive as retail-focused shops like Think or Swim or OptionsXpress and about 10 times as expensive as Interactive Brokers, Crossland/Deep Discount Trading or a couple of others out there at 50 cents a side. I'm willing to pay something for a decent platform but I'm scratching my head as to who their intended customer base is. $7 per side is just nuts, especially when you can find introducing brokers (IBs) with RJO as their FCM, and those IBs offer adequate platforms at a buck or two per side." I believe Eyes is a programmer at GS. He may also be a great trader but it's hard to be an employee at Goldman and have a membership. None of what you speculate upon comes from the actual thread. You make it up and then you treat it as reality. It's nuts ... loney tunes fantasy. NO ONE BUT YOU THINKS THIS THREAD IS FROM A GUY PUSHING 5000 + RT A MONTH. Your perception of who you're talking to and what their interest is is simply a figment of your imagination. I'm done.
haha.....as a 3rd party i am enjoying the mindless debate.....still the information that came becoz of this mindless debate is useful
An update of sorts to the original thread topic: CQG has announced a new price for QTrader -- www.cqg.com/Products/CQG-QTrader.aspx $40/mo and 25 cents per filled contract. That's better than the $65 to $90/mo that was being charged, but it's probably not a good choice for a high-volume trader. However, if you need more than Trader but not all the bells and whistles of Integrated Client (IC), QTrader might be worth a look, even if it costs a couple hundred bucks a month (I believe IC is $600/mo). I've been using a demo version, and as you would expect, a fair number of the IC features have been disabled. I'm OK with that because they've left some basic options functionality, I like their charts, spread matrices and RTD capabilities (and templates). The biggest shortcoming for me is that *I think* they've disabled the "replicate chart" command. I need to dig some more but I haven't been able to create more than one chart per page. You can flip through twenty charts quickly from a watch list, but I can't get two or more charts to display on one page. I can understand throttling it to maybe a couple charts per page, but if they insist on one, it might be a deal breaker. P.S. Thank you to the ET members who wrote to me privately with some background on the CQG product line and gave me some ideas about where to look for more attractive broker/platform deals.