Prospective New User FAQ's

Linn Software does not provide any real time market data subscriptions. However, any of the following live streaming data sources can be processed by Investor/RT:

• Any paper or real money Rithmic or CQG account, hosted by a traditional brokerage firm. StoneX (paper and live) accounts, powered by CQG data, are also supported.
• An Interactive Broker paper or live account
• Any Prop firms offering Evaluation plans powered by Rithmic. Review the list of dedicated prop firm servers available in Investor/RT.
• A DTN IQ feed account, a high-end professional data subscription, providing reliable and accurate tick by tick data.

Rithmic account holders: we are supporting both the direct and "plug in" Connection modes, ie you may connect multiple Rithmic compatible software to the same R Trader Pro application (incl. multiple instances of Investor/RT associated with a single license)

You don't have access to any of the above data sources and still would like to trial Investor/RT ?

• Contact one of the Brokerage firms listed on our Partners page to open a demo account
• or start a 2-week trial with Rithmic or CQG directly, together with your Investor/RT Trial. 

DTN Market Access is the historical data service, solely marketed by Linn Software and provided in collaboration with DTN, a major independant data provider and home of IQ Feed, a professional futures and stock datafeed, compatible with more than 50 industry leading trading softwares. 

How does it work?

DTN MA is primarily designed for Investor/RT subscribers who

• doesn't already own an IQ feed subscription but relies on a brokerage feed (Rithmic, CQG, or InteractiveBrokers) as a primary real-time data source (for futures or stocks)
• but still seek access to high-quality historical data backfills.

When Investor/RT is set up with a brokerage data feed as main live data source, all historical backfill requests are routed to DTN historical servers (rather than your brokerage data feed servers)

What kind of historical market data are available with a DTN MA subscription?

DTN MA provides unlimited access to the same DTN historical data servers, as those used by the owner of a live IQ feed data subscription.

• All main US, European and Asian futures exchanges typically traded with a Rithmic, CQG or Interactive Brokers account.
• The whole range of 6000+ Nasdaq & NYSE stocks (and ETFs), but also the Canadian and UK stock markets
• FOREX: 50 pairs from FXCM and 1500+ pairs from Tenfore
• An exhaustive list of cash index data, fair value premiums and market internals for all main US and EU markets (together with Financial & CBOE VIX indexes)

What are the key benefits of a DTN MA subscription?

1. A much better Historical data coverage than the one available from your broker, i.e. up to 20 years of 1-minute bar data (and 180 days of tick data), while the backfill capabilities from the Rithmic or CQG servers are typically limited to 1 to 3 months, i.e. the duration of the current future front-month contract. 
2. Access to Continuous Future Contracts, back adjusted for rollover premium. This is a must for performing, on a single set of gap-free data, backtest runs as well as long-term chart analysis involving Market (TPO) or Volume profiles, or any kind of VWAP studies.
3. Access to Consolidated Tape data. This is also a must-have feature when it comes to analysing the small vs large players' behaviour. Indeed, Investor/RT has developed unique Trade size filtering capabilities, natively embedded into multiple indicators, and that provides critical information to develop successful trade setups

Reminder: Many of the most valuable Investor/RT features do require gap free historical data series and true real time tick by tick data, including precise Bid/Ask information. Here is what you need to know about the brokerage data providers:

• Rithmic and CQG provide excellent tick-by-tick live futures data; However, their historical backfill coverage is very limited and doesn't include continuous future contract data. Their data servers are not optimized for efficient historical data backfills, as their primary purpose is to ensure a stable connection to the exchange and very fast order routing and execution services.
• Interactive Brokers' live data is not a true tick-by-tick data stream.  The real-time data stream, provided by their API, is made of a series of "snapshots" that aggregate all trades every 300 ms or so (TradingView or TDA/TOS offers the same type of aggregated data streams).This way, the bid/ask information, on a trade-by-trade basis, is lost. See Broker Data vs. Other Feeds for more on this subject.

Where can I find additional information on DTN MA ?

Please review our DTN MA getting started webpage. Indeed, DTN MA is also the ideal data source for many other user profiles, such as:

• any futures (or stock) daytraders willing to test new markets by using our playback built-in trade simulator features, and to see how his favorite trade setups (based on cumulative delta analysis, order flow or footprint patterns, for example) would perform.
• any system developer willing to backtest his trading strategies on a very wide range of futures or stock markets
• more generally, any end-of-day/swing traders interested in accessing our exhaustive technical indicators library, including our unique VWAP, TPO and volume profiling indicators (and possibly using our advanced scan features to screen 1000+ symbols and detect the best trade opportunities)

In such cases, it is often recommended to install (on the same PC) a dedicated second I/RT instance configured to work exclusively with historical DTN MA data downloads (i.e., without any live data reception capabilities).

You may also check our DTN symbol guide for a more detailed overview of the futures, stock, index and other data types that can be downloaded with DTN MA, including, for future markets, a correspondence table with the Rithmic/CQG and IBKR symbol nomenclature.

For the past 30 years, Linn Software has been serving customers trading the worldwide futures, stock/ETF or Forex markets. We are constantly adjusting to the latest evolution of order execution systems and keeping our internal symbol library up to date with the newest futures instruments. 

Whether you trade within an institutional firm, hold a real money account with a brokerage firm  or simply a paper account managed by a prop firm or another trader funding service, you can today connect and execute trades using one of the following order types and routing system:

Configuration	Trade from Charts	Server Side OCO/OSO	Server Side Trailing Stops	Visualize Positions on Charts
Rithmic	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
CQG (incl. StoneX)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Interactive Brokers	Yes	No	No	Yes

The most common data sources / order execution configurations are :

Markets traded	Live Data feed	Historical Backfill	Order execution
Futures (incl. CME crypto)	Rithmic / CQG / IBKR	DTN MA	Same as the live data feed
	DTN IQ Feed	DTN IQ Feed	Rithmic / CQG / IBKR
Stock / ETF / Forex	IBKR	DTN MA	IBKR (or 3rd party)
	DTN IQ Feed	DTN IQ Feed	IBKR (or 3rd party)

Futures: the majority of our customers trade on the US (CME / CBOT / NYMEX / COMEX) and European (EUREX) exchanges, with Rithmic, CQG, and IBKR offering all 3 these markets.

Rithmic is popular thanks to

• the Plug-in feature that allows the user to split a single data connection among multiple Rithmic-compatible applications,
• the ability to trade, this way, multiple prop firm accounts, and/or copy trades
• the full limit order book overview (i.e.market depth levels) offered for CME exchanges.

CQG is more popular among professional traders and institutions, willing to access more futures markets (such as the Asian/Australian exchanges or ICE futures). CQG also offers real time market internal quotes (TICK, TRIN..) not available through Rithmic.

Interactive Brokers provides the most comprehensive solutions by offering order execution for both Futures and stocks/ETFs. To counter the fact that its native data feed doesn't offer any true tick by tick data, it is more frequently used as the "brokerage destination" of an I/RT instance powered with a live IQ Feed subscription.

You may refer to our DTN symbol Guide for an overview of the most liquid futures markets.

Regarding Stocks and ETFs, Investor/RT also provides exhaustive market screening capacities, with the ability to monitor/scan in real-time up to 2500 symbols, with a DTN IQ feed subscription. With an I/RT instance entirely set up for the DTN MA service, you have access to the full 6000+ universe of Nasdaq & NYSE securities.

Regarding Forex, DTN IQ feed subscribers have access to quotes for 50 FXCM pairs (and 1500+ pairs from Tenfore) while Interactive Brokers customers can trade with Investor/RT 100+ currency pairs.

Finally, regarding Crypto, Investor/RT currently only supports the future crypto contracts traded on the CME. It includes the micro and full size BTC and Ether cointrats. More recently, XRP and Solana were added and are gaining in volume/popularity. Most recent CME additions (as per Feb. 2026) includes Stellar, Cardano & Chainlink futures (but correspondiong ytarded volume are still very low)

Since more than 20 years, Investor/RT has supported DTN IQfeed real time data services. IQfeed is a high-end professional solutions providing reliable and accurate tick by tick data.

From a full-time trader perspective, IQ feed is, by far, the preferred data source, and this will de facto also be the solution selected by our institutional customers. Indeed, on top of futures data, IQ feed also provides access, among others, to cash indices, volatility index (VIX) and a very exhaustive list of realtime calculated market breadth indicators (700+) such as TRIN, TICK, Fair Value premiums, with the majority of these quotes being updated every second ! Many successful trading strategies will include components or analysis requiring such quotes (from custom built market breadth indicators or intermarket analysis, to just name a few)

If you are trading US or ETF (such as SPY or QQQ), you can fully benefit from all Investor/RT features (such as Cumulative Delta indicators, Footprint charts or Volume Profile analysis) thanks to IQ Feed real time tick by tick datafeed (that won't be available with the IBKR quotes streamed through their API..)

From a future retail trader perspective, you are already very well equipped with a brokerage data feed associated with a DTN MA subscription (which will provide access to the same DTN historical quote servers).

As discussed at the end of our DTN MA Getting Started webpage, you may, in fact, use our playback and built-in trade simulator features to replicate a chart and trading environment with a full access to the whole range of live IQ feed data. This way, you can experiment the potential added values of incorporating (in your current trading setups) new components involving live cash indexes, Fair value premiums, VIX quotes, DTN market internals, sector ETFs, FANG quotes, etc

Yes. Linn Software is pleased to provide an Investor/RT 14-Day free trial usage period under these conditions:

1. You have a subscription to a DTN IQFeed and/or a brokerage data feed such as Rithmic, CQG, Gain or Interactive Brokers
2. You have not had an Investor/RT trial or been a subscriber within the last six months.
3. You provide valid billing information when setting up your trial. Charge cards are validated, however no charges apply during the trial period.
4. If you elect to subscribe after the 14 Day period, simply do nothing and your billing will commence after 14 days. Note that you may wish to configure the product to suit your needs by managing your subscription.
5. Subscription changes are allowed during the trial period, should you wish to change the product configuration to better suit your needs. To do so, login to the site and from your Account page click on the Subscriptions tab where you can manage your subscription by choosing a different configuration.
6. If you elect to end your trial during the 14 Day period, you must be logged in and from your Account page click on the Subscriptions tab where you can then click Manage subscription. The End Subscription button is on the top right. You will have to verify your credentials (see below), however no charges will occur.
7. After becoming a subscriber, you can end your subscription at any time no less than 48 hours prior to your billing date. You can continue using the product until your current term ends. Afterwards, you can resubscribe at any time. Trial users can end their subscription at any time.
8. Linn Software is 100% PCI compliant and does not record or store any sensitive customer financial data on its servers, therefore any subscription changes or cancellations require the customer to enter a valid card number with matching address and CVV code for security purposes.

You don't have access to any of these data sources and still would like to test Investor/RT with a free Trial ?

In this case, contact one of the Brokerage firms listed on our Partners page to open a demo account, or directly start a 2-week datafeed trial (with either Rithmic or CQG) together with your Investor/RT Trial.

The Subscription level you need will be based on the style of analysis your trading strategies use (TPO and Volume Profile, Volume Analysis and orderflow / Footprint tools, etc). If you were referred to us by a trading educator, find out what Subscription level they recommend based on the tools they use for analysis. Use the pricing table to compare features and pricing.

During your trial period, you may test every Investor/RT feature by subscribing (free of charge) to the Investor/RT Pro package together with the DTN MA historical backfill service. If you elect to subscribe, at the end of your trial, to a different package, that would only include, for example, only one or two add ons (on top of the Core package), you will have the possibility to modify accordingly your subscription on your account page before the end of your trial period.

The latest Investor/RT 15 (64-bit version) has a very small footprint compared to most other trading platforms. It can run on any modern Windows 10 or 11 machine with at least 8GB of RAM. Of course, a PC specification including an SSD, 16 GB or more of RAM, and one of the latest generation CPUs, designed to run with the most recent  Windows 10 or 11 release, can only boost overall performance.

We recommend Windows 11 since this is the operating system that our development staff uses when building and testing (and as Microsoft just stopped supporting Win 10 in October 2025). While Investor/RT should still run fine on Windows 7, we do not recommend using it (or any other OS that Microsoft does not support anymore) as this could always alter your PC performance. 

Linn Software no longer distributes the previous 32-bit versions of Investor/RT that ran natively on Mac OS (up to Mojave 10.14). Prospective users with Apple hardware, running the latest MacOS with M chips, should instead install the latest Investor/RT 64-bit release under Windows11 virtualisation using the latest version of Parallels Desktop software. This environment provides the same level of performance as a native Windows machine. If you are using an M1/M2/M3 chip with Mac OS 14 (or earlier), Parallels 19 should be able to run the latest version of Win11. Otherwise (if you are using MacOS 15 or the recently released Tahoe version) with an M4 or M5 chip, the latest version of Parallels 20 will be required.