Hi Mark,

thank you for your q's. I live in Germany and yes I trade US futures mainly on ECBOT like the bonds (ZB or ZN) or gold (ZG or YG) and on Europe`s biggest exchange for commodities the EUREX (DTB). Predominantly trading on EUREX because that market opens 8 am our time and therefore suits me more than starting the day when the US market opens which is at 3.30 pm our time.
I do not know of course which commodities can and which cannot be traded electronically since I do not watch them all. The ones you are interested in you have to find out.
My markets besides the above mentioned are the GBL (German bond) and the ESTX50 (EUROSTOXX50) which is a stock market index. Both have enough volume to get your orders filled by the fraction of a second and both are (not yet) as program driven as most of the US index futures.
You can - with the right outfit - trade without sitting in front of your computer. I doesn't take much and is relatively inexpensive to get equipped with all you need to perfectly trade elctronically.
I use: IB (Interactive Brokers) being my broker which supplies me with all data real time (EURO 12,00 / Month for EUREX and USD 10,00 / Month for US products), they charge me EURO 3,00 / RT. It is absolutely easy to open an account with them, all done via internet, and you may start with as little as USD 2000,00.
Charting system is SierraChart (SC) - (USD 130,00 / year) which is fed by IB data stream real time. With SC you can program your own indicators and your own alerts if you wish. It offers features like ThreeLineBreak and CBOT's MarketProfile and of course all the standard ones.
My trading engine is ButtonTrader which in my opininion is just great with all its features (USD 130,00 / qtr). You can fully program the whole life cycle of a trade and leave all the execution to the engine. It holds all the possibilities you can think of and runs absolutely stable. Data feed again comes via IB.
Hope this answer your q's. Should you be interested to learn more about my setup I should be only too glad to answer further queries.
Best trades to you and happy trading,
Peter