I would require some form of functional API, before investing money, for sole purpose of getting trading system done, and then I’ll invest money. It’s simple as that, I need to know it’ll be working, without issues first.
Some form of dummy trading API with some virtual credit would be nice, to test algorythms out, I would create myself, but I don’t even have access to data, and without data, I cannot really test algoryhm, before I invest money.
Therefore I want my algorythm to be tested, before I invest my money, therefore I suggest that you would give without signing in atleast access to bars and qoutes, so people could test out what their algorythms can do, before investing a lot of capital.
In third world where I live, it’s 5 year income of 3 member familly, I know in US it’s two months, but…
Yes, Alpaca provides free market data. We welcome, and encourage, anyone to sign up for a paper trade account to run and test algorithms before going live. Alpaca understands that data is often a key requirement for any trading algorithm. We therefore provide free access to IEX market quotes and trades. This data can be used to test an algorithm in the paper trading environment at no charge. See the documentation for more information.
There are some limitations to this free IEX data. It only includes quotes and trades from the major exchanges and doesn’t capture data outside of those exchanges. There is data for all the active stocks tradable on Alpaca it just may not be as ‘dense’. However, once an algo is debugged in paper trading, it can easily be moved over to actual trading in a live account. If one has a live account, then data from Polygon.io can be used free of charge. Polygon provides data covering all exchanges and is therefore more robust.
One can actually include any data in an algorithm. You aren’t limited to the IEX and Polygon data provided by Alpaca. Data is never free (though some have free plans). Here is a sample of some options