We may have a little confusion here.
These are not separate things. All futures data is supplied by
CME, the futures exchange, no matter how it gets to you.
If you are using IB, the data started out from CME and is sent to you through IB. If you are using any other data feed, the data started out from CME, and is sent to you through your particular data connection, which is provided by some company that obtains it first from CME. But CME does not have or provide a separate data feed you can use.
CME places the requirement that non-professional traders with funded broker accounts must pay CME $5 per month per exchange (
CBOT, NYMEX, CME, COMEX -- these are all parts of CME Group). Professionals or people without a funded broker account pay $105 per month per exchange. (The particular
futures contract you are interested in will be traded on one or another of these four "exchanges," so you may not have to pay for each. -- I apologize if this is getting confusing.
Stay with it. It is actually simple enough once you get it.)
The CME-required fee is going to be paid no matter what data service you use to obtain your futures data (which is always CME data). You may also have a fee on top of that, which is added by the data service you use. There may be different deals and different combinations, but at the bottom of it is the data, which originally is provided by CME Group, and the CME fee, which is not the same as the fee that you have to pay in addition from a data service, whether IB or IQFeed or Kinetic (which is IQFeed ) or
CQG or anything else.
The fees vary a lot, so you should look around.
But there's no "CME data connection" that is a better deal than IQFeed or IB or whatever. You always have the CME fee, then there's whatever else you have. Your broker is going to bundle all these charges for you on your statement, as part of the commission and fees.
I hope this is a little more clear now.
Bob.
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Edited to fix some dumb mistakes with the names and abbreviations. I hope no one saw this before I fixed it.