Metastock – Legacy local end of day data (MSFL format created via The DownLoader 11). Most data providers supply Metastock data in this format.
Yahoo – Free tick, fundamental and end of day data.
Alpha Vantage – Free end of day and real-time data.
MSN Money – Free end of day data. Limited to one year.
Stock Portfolio Organizer features an extremely advanced and modular data feed plugin architecture which has the following unique features:
- Supports two different data feed plugin types. ‘Event Driven’ and ‘Normal’.
- Supports two different download modes ‘Smart’ and ‘Normal’.
- Supports redundant backup data feeds.
You may be wandering what that means for you the average user? Firstly, Stock Portfolio Organizer is able to download data for portfolios of any size and across as many markets as you wish. You can run different plugins for different markets. Secondly, it is able to download data from any type of source, whether it is free web based like Yahoo or something more complicated like IB etc. Plugins to support more data sources are being developed all the time so if you have a suggestion please don’t hesitate to send us a message.
If you are developer or want to create your own plugin, stay tuned. Currently creating your own data plugins is in very early beta and once the API is stable we will make it available to everyone.
Stock Portfolio Organizer supports two different data feed plugin types ‘Event Driven’ and ‘Normal’.
- ‘Event Driven’ plugins have full control of when they fetch data and when this data is passed to the program. The advantages of this are that they are very flexible and can support any data source. The disadvantage is they are more difficult to program.
- ‘Normal’ plugins are less flexible but are extremely simple to create as most of the the heavy lifting is done by Stock Portfolio Organizer.
So what are redundant back up data feeds? They are data feeds that will take over in the event something goes wrong with your current data feed such as an outage. If you are using a paid data service, outages are rare but can happen. If you have important alerts setup and leave your computer unattended, you can be confident that your portfolio is being monitored. This feature can be especially useful if you rely on free data sources which are notoriously unreliable..
The data feed engine supports two different download modes across all plugin types ‘Smart’ and ‘Normal’. To understand these two different modes we need to categorize the different data that can be downloaded via a data feed plugin. EOD data and fundamental data is classified as historical. Real-time and tick data is classified as real-time.
- In ‘Normal’ mode the data feed engine will download the maximum amount of real-time and historical data for all tickers in the database regardless of whether they have trades or not. For a small number of stocks this is fine but if you have a large number of stocks in many different markets, this can be too much data for even the best designed program to handle.
- In ‘Smart’ mode the data feed engine will download the maximum amount of historical data for all tickers. For real-time data the data feed engine will only download the data that is needed and only for tickers that have trades. This is the default and recommended mode.