Market data comes in many ways, shapes, and forms. That could be prices & volumes, estimates, fundamentals, corporate actions, sentiment, derived metrics, national statistics, and technical indicators among many others.
And, what exactly is the purpose of that data? Well, it has various uses, be it charting, reporting, analysis, predictions, valuation, or backtesting. In the end, the user is an investor, trader, or institution looking to gain what is referred to as Alpha. Alpha has many definitions, be they technical, fundamental, or theoretical. For instance, Investopedia describes it as an investment strategy’s ability to beat the market, or it’s edge, while at the same time referring to it as the excess return, highlighting its often use alongside beta, or market volatility. And, of course, that’s where SeekingAlpha derives its name.
Regardless of what we call it, traders and investors are looking for insight that will help them make money and grow wealth. And, in this day-and-time, data has become somewhat of a Holy Grail for seeking strategies to do that. Whether it’s a high-frequency trading quant firm crunching terabytes of OHLCV (open, high, low, close, volume) data or a single speculator analyzing drill results from a handful of resource explorers, most people are using data now.
Now, data is typically gathered and analyzed as end-of-day or historical. End-of-day is basically a snapshot of data from today, while historical data just spans back a certain time frame using a certain periodicity (seconds, minutes, hourly, daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly).
Finviz
Get Finviz Elite Subscription.
Finviz offers a wide array of services including heat maps, sector/industry analysis, portfolio trackers performance in futures/forex/crypto, and a backtesting engine. While several of these services require the Elite subscription, Finviz’s cornerstone service is their screener. The Finviz screener might be the best go to site for descriptive, fundamental, and technical end-of-day data on stocks. It allows a variety of filters including, but not limited to, exchange, sector, industry, market cap, P/E ratios, P/B ratios plus many other ratios among all the popular fundamental measures and technical indicators. After screening, Finviz allows the downloading of this data as a csv file upon subscribing to their Elite service.
TradingView
TradingView is, in my opinion, an absolutely incredible platform with many very intricate cool features. It blends social media style posting with a programming language called Pine that allows users to backtest strategies, and then subsequently share these strategies and ideas with other users. As well, their charting features are off the charts. You can blend any mixture of technical indicators you like, plus layer over different tickers for cumulative return performance comparison.
One of their best services may be connection to their list of brokers, which includes, among others, TradeStation, AMP, OANDA, and Gemini. So, just right there, it spans stocks, ETFs, futures, forex, and crypto. While TradingView does not provide automated trading directly with the Pine language, they do allow the user to place trades directly through their interface. And this is the next best thing to automated trades, since you have the ability to set up very customized alerts using Pine or their in-house built-in strategies.
In addition, TradingView does allow exporting of historical data, but not without a premium subscription.
MarketRails
The MarketRails Multi-Ticker Downloader provides the user with an interface to overlay several different tickers into one chart. Therefore, the chart automatically plots cumulative return. This application allows the user to download data from the tickers chosen with the following columns for each tickers included: Ticker, Date, Open, High, Low, Close, Volume, Adjusted Close, Returns, and Cumulative Returns. This downloads in csv format.
