a couple of other posters have made points I would have made about IB. I don't understand the significance of the mm claim. You can always self-direct your route. In my experience limit orders go up on Islnd immediately. I have never seen any screwing around.
As for TS, I have never used the TS brokerage. I did use the early versions of Ts from ver. 1.0 up through the disaster that was 2000i. Of these, two(1.0 and 2000i) were clearly not ready for prime time when released. Version 4.0 was brilliant. Their game was a common ploy in the software world--keep introducing "new and better" versions of stuff that worked perfectly well, charge you a bomb for the new one and drop support on the old. Their tech rep's had little apparent knowledge of the product or trading. For nonprogrammers, learning Easylanguage is time-consuming, and at least when I was using them, they would not answer coding questions on the phone. Very annoying and difficult to deal with.
Frankly, they left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I would never, ever consider using them as a broker. I suppose it's possible they have improved, but the same people, the Cruz brothers, are still running things.
I will say I learned a lot from the backtesting ability of TS. I think some sort of backtesting is just essential for a newbie trying to trade futures. At the time TS was pretty much the only game in town, at least for a retail trader without extensive programming ability. Now there are plenty of alternatives.
