Hi everyone,
I’m new to both Alpaca and algorithmic trading, and I’m trying to experiment with Python scripts for automated trading using historical data for backtesting. I’ve run into some trouble with accessing data through IEX Cloud (which I understand is no longer available) and am also having difficulty getting the yfinance API to work as expected. I suspect that the free dataset might not be large enough to support the kind of queries I need.
For my backtesting, I’d like to perform a 30-day backtest using my trading algorithm, and the dataset should include all NASDAQ and NYSE stocks. The key challenge here is that if I have to manually define the tickers, the backtest results won’t reflect a true representation of the strategy I intend to use, making the test effectively useless.
Additionally, the data should be derived from 1-minute charts, and the 30-day window doesn’t need to be recent—it could even be from last year or any previous period.
So, my question is: Are there any free APIs available that provide access to large datasets for backtesting? Most of the paid APIs I’ve seen so far are a bit prohibitive for someone like me who is just starting out.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!