If you have a futures account at a brokerage that you fund with your own money you will need to pay fees in order to receive data.
Exchange data is provided via your broker via a data provider, e.g. Rithmic or CQG. There may be fees for access to the data provider as well as fees charged by each exchange, e.g. CME or Eurex.
These fees are collected by your broker each month and are of the order of $10-$100 per exchange depending upon your non-professional or professional trader status.
In a “real” brokerage account, you’ll also most likely be paying an order routing fee as well as exchange transaction fees and broker commission for each trade that you make.
Evaluators’ live accounts typically charge monthly fees that cover the exchange market data fees. Some evaluators make a single up-front charge and absorb the cost of subsequent months. Others require a payment from you – typically by credit/debit card rather than from your account balance – each month.
In a “real” prop firm, you’d be classified by the CME as a professional trader because you’re trading someone else’s funds. This results in exchange data fees around 10-15x higher than for non-professional traders. At the time of writing, the professional fees per CME group exchange, i.e. CME, CBOT, NYMEX, COMEX are around $115 for each exchange per month.
Yet, most trading evaluators are comfortable with most traders that pass their evaluations self-certifying as “non-professional” and collecting a $50-$100 monthly “live account fee”. One of the clauses for non-professional traders in self-certification is that “the trader has a funded futures trading account” i.e. cash sitting in an account at a futures brokerage. How many trading evaluator traders actually have a cash-funded account at a futures brokerage?
It’s an interesting situation that live account fees are lower than professional exchange fees for a set of traders that may not have their own funded trading accounts. The next article will provide some insight on how this situation can exist…
