Which firm to trade CME and NYMEX?

I am fed up with the service of IB and want to open an account at another futures broker. I have an account value less than 10K. I try to choose one with following criterias:

1) I mainly trade ES, 6E of CME and GC, CL of NYMEX.

2) Must have good customer service, responsive and easy to wire money out.

3) Commission is not the most important thing to me since I am not a high frequency trader. < $6 /RT is acceptable.

4) Have good trading software but not requiring me to pay monthly fee for it.

Your opinion is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

I am mainly considering Open E Cry, Advantage Futures and Velocity Futures, seems they all have good reputation in customer service. I just got a commission table from Open E cry and seems it's low enough for me :

http://www.openecry.com/rates/rates.cfm

I just don't know how good their own trading platform is.

 

You can play with their Demo. It seemd a bit slow on my system, compared to other platforms I have tested/run... The demo does have a realtime data feed so you can try strategies, etc....

 

Thanks. I have downloaded the demo to play with.

I also wonder anyone knows answer to this question: Velocity Futures provides a free X-trader for higher commision. I think the commission is not too high for me. But I can only connect to one exchange at one time, while I want to trade both Nymex and CME. However, now CL and GC of Nymex can both be traded on Globex of CME, does this means when my X-trader connects to CME I can also trade CL and GC without switching exchanges? I have never used X-trader before ( the only platform I used is TWS ) so this question may seem dumb.

Thanks.

 

I installed the demos of both E Open Cry's OEC trader and Futurepath's PhotonTrader and compare them with TWS. After looking at the ES quotes for a while, seems OEC trader's quotes update is a bit slower than TWS, but just a bit. On the other hand PhotonTrader is much faster than both of them, man, it updates just like crazy, obviously you can't see every bid-ask and transaction update from TWS.

 

I would suggest ProActive Futures, Mirus Futures, or OpenEcry. If you contact PA or Mirus, ask for a T4 demo - very nice software!

 

this might sound silly but ETRADE is promoting futures now
with TT as its platform

 

Anyone who used the brokers' platforms mentioned above: do they have other mkt statistics such as $TICK, mkt breadths (adv/decl issues) etc, or are they purely futures trading platforms with just DOM/Ladder, MP and some charts on contracts? TIA.

 

besides velocity, etrade, and global, who offers free (transactional) x-trader?

 

Farr Financial and its "Fast Platform" have been my vote for the few years of trading. Good Luck!