Old Market Data in Basic Account Subscription

Alpaca Market Data
1

Hello!

I’m fairly new to Alpaca, so please bear with me.

From Alpaca’s API, I retreived some StockLatestQuote, using their StockLatestQuoteRequest. Here’s the code I used - nothing too special.:

Code to retreive StockLatestQuote 
@app.get("/pricing/stocks")
@timed
async def pricing_for_stocks():
    if len(app.state.instruments.validated.__dict__) > 0:
        stock_symbols = app.state.instruments.validated.stocks
        etfs_multisymbol_request = StockLatestQuoteRequest(symbol_or_symbols=stock_symbols)
        quotes = app.state.clients.stocks.get_stock_latest_quote(etfs_multisymbol_request)
        return quotes
    else:
        return {'error': 421}

Upon inspection of the data, I can see that, for some symbols, only very old market data is available. Here’s an excerpt of this data, shortened to not blow this post up:

[
  {
    "symbol": "UTX",
    "timestamp": "2021-05-02 10:49:15.091443+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "DPW",
    "timestamp": "2021-12-10 21:00:00.000044+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "FB",
    "timestamp": "2022-06-08 20:00:55.013109+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "NOVN",
    "timestamp": "2023-07-25 20:00:00.007237+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "SCHN",
    "timestamp": "2023-08-31 19:59:50.784781+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "BOSS",
    "timestamp": "2023-10-30 16:57:24.140304+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "MOB",
    "timestamp": "2024-07-19 19:58:22.107262+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "HAS",
    "timestamp": "2024-07-19 19:59:56.795800+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "SBC",
    "timestamp": "2025-04-11 14:31:29.572080+00:00"
  },
  {
    "symbol": "DTG",
    "timestamp": "2025-04-11 14:48:56.432252+00:00"
  }
]

From their sales page, I can retreive that for a Basic Account, such as mine, the IEX exchange will be used to source the data. Regarding this data, my questions now would be:

  • Is my interpretation correct that for the retreived symbols, the timestamp indicates the time of the last trade on IEX?
  • Could this data be valid?
  • Does any member with a paid account also experience this?

Thank you very much!
Cheers

2

This is the statement made by Alpaca on the difference between paid and free subscriptions and this (hopefully) should answer your question:

        Both this paid plan and the free plan provide 'real time' data. 
        However, the paid plan provides actual real time OPRA data, 
         while the free plan provides randomized' indicative' data. 
        This is similar to equity (ie stock) data. 
        The paid plan provides full market real time SIP data, 
        while the free plan provides real time data from a single exchange (the IEX exchange). 
        The free plan data is primarily meant for algo testing and debug and 
        should not be used for live trading decisions.