Impressive first post! I suggest you ask specific questions, if you have them, in a TS thread ding dong.
By the way, for those who may not be aware... Rithmic is now providing a white-labeled solution for Vision Financial Markets: http://www.visionfinancialmarkets.com/futures/services/activetrading/ You can trade via R|API, or Ninja.
I think it would be nice to collect all the Rithmic-enabled brokers info somewhere in same place. I know only Optimusfutures provides Rithmic and R Trader. Now we can add Vision markets... Need to find out what their comms are like though
Looks like Optimus is an IB for Vision. http://www.optimusfutures.com/futures-commodities-trading-account.htm
The best choice for the beginner and advanced trader is definitely Mirus/NT+Zen-Fire/RCG Clearing. My account is with them. Those who don´t want to pay the 60$ per month, can go with openecry. I traded with them before and no problems. The platform, the clearing and everything is excelent. The platform is pretty much like NT, and can be said that is even better then NT, but heavier for sure, and the feed is slightly slower than ZenFire. The account minimum is 5k and if you don´t have, you can go with atcbrokers, they are IB of openecry and the account minimum there is 2500$. For proffesional traders, advantage futures seems to right choice. Personaly still don´t have experience with them.
So R|API is essentially Zen Fire? meaning R|API is a datafeed that Ninja or other front-end software can connect to?
My understanding is that ZF is basically running in instance of Rithmic's code on their own hosted servers, sort of like how a broker/FCM might run TT's FIX gateway. In terms of what that means for actual data rates, etc, etc... I don't know the answers to that. I'd be interested in more people doing comparative research and getting us some hard numbers. But for now, I'm assuming they're pretty similar.
Rithmic is better. Zen is buggy Rithmic wrapper which cant be faster by definition. For retail users the difference is negligible though.