You can power SC and R/Trader simultaneously with the Rithmic feed so I have, in times past, used SC as my charting and R/Trader to execute thereby taking advantage of the server side management on R/Trader executed trades. But, as you, suggest, if you execute through SC there is no server side management of brackets.
Rithimic also does not allow tick backfill data through SC with Deep Discount. It does with Advantage and its IB's and, of course, always has it with all brokers on it's own series of R platforms. For many, my guess is you included, this will be a deal breaker. I leave my charts up always and have it tick by tick in house that way. My setting is tick and I only keep three days of it. It's not a research tool for me. It sounds like you will opt for TT as it works well for you.
As to cost: Everyone will do their own calculations. For guys that are scalping all day the $.30 on the margin can/will be prohibitive. For me it is a minor expense that seems larger because of the a la carte nature of DeepDiscount's pricing. I like the way you can assemble the package you want knowing the cost of the components. I used to compare my ticks to Al Brooks' and, with Rithmic, mine were consistently a touch faster than his Trade Station feed. To me the feed is key. I've seen crap feeds produce bars that were "almost" reality and that just doesn't work for me.
That said, if I were trading a 100 RT daily or better, it certainly would matter. In fact I'm not doing that so the incremental cost works for me. Many will make a different judgement. But with Howard's way you have choices galore and I love that.
Swan, Question to you about Rithmic. DDT has SierraChart, which can work with either TT or Rithmic. Problem is, that raises r/t cost by 30 cents (Rithmic over TT). I would think that will add up pretty quickly...
I use Sierra with TT feed at Velocity, and if I do move, I was thinking of staying with the same combo. I just love the way Sierra does tick data backfill. My charting is something I have now taken for granted, and would never consider anything less. Not sure if Sierra would backfill the same way with Rithmic - it probably will since the backfill is provided by Sierra's data farm (yes, they have a historic data farm for backfill)
Now I just need to convince myself that the 30 cent r/t extra "insurance" is worth it, but is having a hard time with that...
Edit: Not entirely sure the bracket management will be server side if Sierra is used with Rithmic feed. If so, that would mean a platform change from Sierra to Rithmic. That would be _very_ hard [/QUOTE]