Building trading system for bit coin?

[turnstyle]

Hi, I'm new to bit coin but not at all new to financial markets. Nice to meet everyone. I think that the concept is great and have been buying some lately. My main complaint is that trading fees are much too high to create a profitable short term trading system for btc. Also, I'm not sure where to get tick data for bit coin that would be useful for backtesting. Any ideas would be great

Also I know bit coin is one word it's this stupid iPad keeps "correcting" it...

[XCoiner]

Most Exchanges charge in the range of 0.5%.  Is that really too high, especially considering that there is no minimum quantity?