Choosing Real-Time Stock Data Feeds by Latency, Fidelity, and Cost
Summary
This discussion offers a framework for selecting a dependable real-time stock data feed, especially for second-by-second or tick data. It separates use cases by latency and fidelity needs: a broker's streaming feed may suit users without strict latency requirements who can accept conflated ticks, while enterprise vendors or specialized low-latency services address more demanding requirements. The replies also caution that price, accuracy, and speed involve trade-offs.
The recommendations are anecdotal rather than a comparative evaluation, and vendor offerings and prices may change. The response suggests assessing API usability, available market depth and auxiliary data, connection options, security coverage, summary data, support quality, recovery and failover behavior, symbol conventions, data limits, and test access. These criteria make the advice useful beyond the named providers: feed suitability depends on an application's data resolution, infrastructure, and reliability requirements, not just headline latency. The document gives no formal benchmark or guarantee of provider quality.
Key ideas
- A broker feed can be a practical choice when strict low latency and un-conflated ticks are unnecessary.
- Enterprise and specialized feeds target users with greater fidelity or latency requirements, usually at higher cost.
- Compare providers on API fit, market depth, security coverage, and available connection methods.
- Check recovery, failover, symbol mapping, data limits, test access, and support before choosing a feed.
- The provider recommendations are anecdotal and are not supported by controlled performance comparisons.
Tags
Full text
# Where can I get a dependable data stream of stock prices? # Where can I get a dependable data stream of stock prices? I want a dependable stream of second-by-second stock data. I have looked into quantgo, iqFeed and QuantHouse. Quantgo and iqFeed seem decent. QuantHouse with its ultra low latency speeds seems like overkill for what I am looking for but may be of some use later. I am not looking for the cheapest, but for the most dependable. Does anyone have either any experience with any of them or know of a company that offers such real time date feeds. ## Answer by jharonfe (score 3) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/32386 If you don't have strict low latency requirements and don't care if the provider is conflating tick data, then I would recommend using a broker's market data feed. Many electronic brokers offer access to connect to streaming market data alongside their other services. This will be the cheapest option in terms of cost, and will also likely be the easiest to develop on. If you need an enterprise solution, and can afford to pay several thousand dollars a month, then the likes of Bloomberg, ActiveX, SR Labs, IDC, S&P's Quanthouse, are some of the big providers out there that I am acquainted with. For high fidelity, ultra low latency requirements, I would recommend either MayStreet's Bellport or SR Labs. In addition to factors such as latency, data fidelity, and cost, I would also consider the following: - How easy is it to develop on their api ? Does their api service model satisfy your application's requirements ? - In terms of tick data, do they provide only the inside market ? Level 1 data ? Level 2 data ? What other auxiliary data do they offer ? - What options are there to connect into their feeds ? Internet ? Collocate ? Vpn ? Something else ? - What is the universe of securities they support ? - In addition to raw tick data, what sorts of aggregate and summary data do they offer ? - How capable is their IT ? Do they respond quickly and with useful answers or no ? - Does their api have methods to recover from connection drops, session corrupted, server failover, etc ? How robust are these procedures ? - What symbology schema do they use to lookup and request data ? Is it consistent with your system's symbology ? - What sort of data limits do they impose ? Do they offer a test server to develop on ? Hope that helps. ## Answer by elleciel (score 3) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/32400 Cheap, accurate, fast: choose two. IQFeed is the cheapest broker-neutral feed that I know of for this and they have reasonable accuracy. Otherwise, brokers often package in a data feed for free. QuantHouse's feed etc. are about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive.
Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.