Choosing REST and Streaming APIs for Market Data
Summary
The exchange compares REST-style web APIs with other ways to obtain market data, especially for US equities. REST can suit historical prices, web charting, and non-time-critical reference data, while live pricing may call for streaming protocols or direct connections to brokers, vendors, liquidity providers, or FIX/FAST interfaces. The practical choice depends on the application’s latency and reliability requirements.
The responses report that, at the time of the discussion, available services included SOAP offerings and non-REST web APIs, and one response later names a provider said to offer both REST and WebSocket access across several asset classes. The examples are historical answers, not a current vendor directory or independent evaluation of service quality. They provide no latency benchmarks, coverage comparisons, or service-level evidence. A trader choosing a feed would still need to check present-day availability, exchange coverage, licensing, data granularity, and whether the interface meets the system’s performance needs.
Key ideas
- REST interfaces can work well for historical queries, charting, and static reference data.
- Real-time trading may need lower-latency streaming or direct market connectivity.
- SOAP, REST, WebSocket, and FIX/FAST represent different interface choices with different use cases.
- The named providers and reported capabilities reflect the discussion’s date and require current verification.
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Full text
# Data feed API that uses REST? # Data feed API that uses REST? Is there a data feed provider that has a REST (http) API? Preferably real-time and historical, at least for US equities. ## Answer by jordan.baucke (score 2) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/4377 I'm working on building one! But the short answer is no, I haven't found one. There are some good SOAP web-services from: Xignite, they are the defacto standard for web-based data-service APIs, or at least the biggest as of recently. Nanex also offers a more robust API offering that is delivered via the web, but it's not rest. There are lots of questions here about data-services, and I think the moderators have mixed feelings about the relevance of this topic. I've asked around Quora, and a few other places. Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to hear more. ## Answer by Matt Wolf (score 2) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/4379 To be honest, I think of most purposes data feeds that peruse SOAP or REST are pretty useless. The only applications that benefit from that would be web-based charting tools that deal with historical prices as well as parts of an application that is not speed or performance critical such as static data (symbol lists and the like). However, anything real-time I strongly advise against such technologies and rather go with solid APIs, direct access to liquidity providers, brokers, data vendors or Fix/Fast. Anything web-based in relation to real-time pricing data sounds very sketchy to me and I would not spend much time looking for such solutions. Do you mind elaborating what you really like to do? In most all situations I probably can recommend an alternative technology that proves a lot more stable and faster. Try me ;-) ## Answer by Quinton Pike (score 0) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/41733 https://polygon.io Has both websockets and RESTful APIs for stocks, crypto and forex. Their stocks feed is CTA network A+B, UTP and OTC.
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