Quote from OP:
I'd have gone with Interactive Brokers, but those guys want you to have a $10k deposit and a $25k+ net worth, which I don't have as a poor ol' college student
Because you are just starting out, going with IB sounds like a good idea. You can try US brokers not registered in Canada later.
IB has physical presence in Canada (a small branch office in Montreal), the account is insured under Canadian rules (CIPF), you don't need to pay your bank for wire transfers to/from US (funds can be sent to IB as a "bill payment" from RBC, TD, etc).
25k+ net worth is just a nuisance required by Canadian regulators, nobody will ever check that, you just need to be a bit creative here (when I got into trading years back, the minimum to open an account with Refco Canada was "250k excluding home equity").
10k is a minimum to open an IB account. After that you can pull some money out (just don't do that the next day), you will be able to trade as long as you don't go below 2k.
For charting I would suggest to try both SierraChart and Ninja Trader, as mentioned in earlier posts. You can have multiple instances of Sierra running, each one connected to a different feed.
IB data is 100-150 ms and not 300 ms (as far as I know). This is sufficient for 3 or 5 minute bars but not good enough for tick charts, volume profile, market delta, etc. To get reliable tick data you can use DTN IQfeed with Sierra (about $100 per month).
IB also offers something called "true data". It is full data set but 5 seconds delayed. There are some DLLs created by Sierra users that combine the snapshot data with "true data". This workaround resolves the issue of highs and lows occasionally missed by the snapshot on short time frame bars. It is mostly used by those who need data from exchanges not supported by IQfeed (ASX, Hong Kong, etc).
