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Without a trading account, you will pay professional fees for CME data. You need to have a funded account.
Thanks,
Matt Z
Optimus Futures
There is a substantial risk of loss in futures trading. past performance is not indicative of future results.
Trading futures and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You may lose more than your initial investment. All posts are opinions and do not claim to be facts. Please conduct your own due diligence. Use only Risk capital when trading Futures.
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Matt is correct. CME requires you to pay the full professional fee for data, which is, as I recall, $105/month, if you don't have a trading account. If you do have a trading account, I believe it's something like $5 (I could be out of date here), and sometimes the broker will pick it up for you. Basically, CME doesn't want to give the data away if they're not going to get any trading from you.
One thing is to look for demo accounts offered by brokers, but there will be a limit on the time they can be used (I believe there is a limit of 2 weeks), although often they can be renewed once, which gives you a month. Then the brokers want you to make up your mind, which is reasonable.
I am going from memory (I did it once, a while ago), but I think the deal comes down to something like this:
- Sierra Chart's own data feed (which is excellent) is available at different prices based on the number of symbols (futures contracts, e.g. ES, CL, etc.) you get. You'll have to take a look, but I believe that when I used this there was an option for something like 10 symbols, more than enough for most people, for about 10 bucks/month. It's not the first choice listed, so read the whole page; it's there somewhere.
- Sierra Chart monthly fee for the platform: I pay $24/month; you can get some more functionality that I don't use for another $10 or so. Look into the account options for that.
- CME monthly professional data fee, which is charged by Sierra and passed on to CME: When I did this, some time ago, Sierra Chart charged me a fee of $115/month, which I believe is higher than the actual CME fee. Perhaps since SC is located in New Zealand, they were giving themselves a little cushion for exchange rate changes; but I don't really know why there's a difference.
BUT: On the same page or somewhere on the site, you will find that CME offers a one month free trial, and I think that Sierra Chart has a two-week or so trial on their data (I think you can extend that another 2 weeks; you'll have to check), and Sierra Chart itself has some kind of trial offer for the platform, which you will also have to look around the site for. So you could go for a month with very little outlay of cash. More than enough time to know if you want to use the platform.
One more thing, very important: the CME's idea of "one month" means the entire calendar month or any part of it, so if you sign up on the first of the month, or the 15th of the month, or the last day of the month, any of those counts as a whole month and you have to pay the whole fee. Also, if you take the 1-month free CME trial, same deal: any part of a month is the same as all the month. So time your decisions based on this, if these fees are important to you.
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Or, now or after the free trial periods, just put together a few bucks and open a broker account.
Right, I had forgotten that. This does really change the cost picture.
CME merged with other exchanges over the years, but kept them as separate "exchanges" within the CME Group, and they all have separate data fees.
For instance,
ES is CME and so is NQ - that's one fee for anything on that "exchange"
CL is NYMEX - that's another
YM is CBOT - that's another
GC is COMEX - that's another
This would get ridiculous fast. The original question had to do with ES and CL, so that's two fees, total $210 per month.
Unless you're only planning to do a short-term look at the platform, or at futures generally, and would be done with your looking after the free trial period, go ahead and open a brokerage account. Within a few months you would have spent the same money on the no-broker option, and not have the money any more.
(It is not wise or safe to trade the small minimum amounts brokers sometimes allow to open accounts -- there's no cushion for losses, which will come -- but to just get one open so you can access the data and/or trade in sim, this would be a better choice. Meanwhile, add to the account balance as much as you can before actually trading.)
