Have you heard of Generic Brokers?

[virtusa]

Generic asks $59 for using the platform you need to trade intraday. Many other brokers give you that for free. They also have no cheap or free datafeed, which you can have with some brokers.
If you trade futures, Ninjatrader is much cheaper than Generic. Free datafeed and free platform. Saves you already over $2300 a year. Datafeed signal or iqfeed cost about $1600 and platform fee is $708.

 

[Lukeronchi]

I don’t think there’s any minimum amount of balance you need to maintain day-trade futures. But yes, you do need to have enough money in the account to cover the trading margins and fluctuation that could arise because of your positions.

I’ve been trading with fxview and tastyworks and you are right, minimum balance is not an issue but to be safe one should always maintain a decent trading balance in account.

 

[VMIIItrader]

Regarding fees, refer to the footnotes on the "additional fees" popup on this page... https://www.generictrade.com/commissions/

*Generic Trade clients will automatically subscribe to the Generic Trader suite of platforms (Generic Trader Professional, Online and Mobile) and will be subject to a $59/month subscription fee. Since the CME Group has raised their fees (see above for details), CME Group and ICE fees will be added by request only. If you wish to select the free Generic Trader Online exclusively, you must do so by email, prior to the initial funding of the account.

Regarding your mention of no data fee, a.k.a free data, refer to this page...
https://www.generictrade.com/cme-group-data/

Please note that if you are not subscribed to the market segment, you will still receive real-time data, but only for the last trade and not for the full market depth.

The oddities I refer to are in the footnotes on this page...
https://www.generictrade.com/commissions/margins/

The thing they call Enhanced Intraday Margin System (EIMS) appears to apply to some very popular products including indexes!

¹Standard Day Trade Margin is offered to most clients with futures trading experience and is available during any open session as long as a $1000 balance is maintained. Strict adherence to the Intraday Margin Policy (provided upon funding account) is necessary to maintain day trading margin privileges.

²The Enhanced Intraday Margin System (EIMS) is available by request from seasoned traders that have familiarity with our platforms and risk management expectations. At least $1000 must be maintained at all times and clients enabled with EIMS, are only permitted to trade from 8:30am CT to 3:05pm CT. Full details and restrictions of the EIMS are outlined in the EIMS policy.


Thanks for sharing your current first-hand experience.
Good trading to you.

Sorry, I haven't been on here in a long time, but was looking for some information regarding another topic and came across this, so I am replying.

When I stated "the additional transaction charges are the exchange and nfa, but no data or route fees", that is truly still the case. They don't use a data vendor and claim to essentially be their own data vendor as they provide all of the data form the exchange directly unfiltered. Therefore they don't charge $.25-$.50 a trade for a data fee as some do. What you were referring to were CME Group fees, that is something different. If you want market depth (Level II) data, you need to pay the CME Group for that through them, but they provide real-time Level I data for every market (even ICE) for free. As for the Margin, it seems like everyone gets access to day trade margin that is only 25% of the overnight margin (Initial Margin) and those with experience can ask for what they call EIMS for margin as low as $50. I have that and trade the ES with $500 and sometimes the MES for $50. What I like is that some other places that have really, really low margin like this have auto-liquidation and that can wipe out your whole account (I have heard stories about this at Interactive Brokers). They seem to have auto-liquidation as a backup, but have a margin team that will take out individual trades just to keep the margin at the appropriate levels. It seems like a great system that I haven't seem before. Also, since I posted last, they have released all new platforms that are unreal. Their old mobile platform was horrendous and the new one does everything their best desktop one does. I never traded mobile before,but now I only trade on a tablet or phone and am never in my office. Anyways, I still have some other accounts, but when I'm day trading indices, there is nowhere I would rather be.