Suggestions for Automated Platform/Broker for IRA and Futures

Discussion in 'Automated Trading' started by Allistah, May 7, 2011.

  1. Allistah

    Allistah

    Hello all --

    I currently trade my IRA account with ThinkOrSwim with Futures and am averaging about 30 contracts a day. I have the ability to code so programming is not an issue.

    One thing I am concerned with is being locked into only being able to trade futures. At ThinkOrSwim I can trade whatever I want, equities, futures, or options in my IRA. I trade Futures near 100% of the time so if I was limited to that it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. I currently have $2 per contract at ToS for futures as well with no data fees and no IRA fees.

    What would you guys recommend to me for trading my IRA with futures? Right now I'm trading everything manually and it's a lot of work staying on top of these strategies so I need to be able to automate them.

    I was thinking about going to Tradestation but I would be limited to only futures, would have data fees, would pay more in commissions, would be limited in the computers I could use (can't use it at home and then go to work and use the computer there) so this is sort of a problem for me.

    I'm thinking about NinjaTrader but don't know how well it works. Would I be able to pay for NinjaTrader out of my IRA account? What about the data fees?

    Can someone help me out and point me in the right direction?

    Thank you very much...

    -Alli