Spent 3 of 5 daily requests. All three were informative:
ETF data (SPY/QQQ/IWM) requires Basic - free tier is single stocks only.
Full-chain GEX (all expirations) requires Growth - free and Basic must
query one expiration per request, so even with history a full-chain
backfill would be 24-54 requests per day of history.
AAPL?expiration=2026-09-18 returned 200 with the right schema but a nearly
empty payload: 13 of 93 strikes carried any open interest, total call OI
4,296 against CBOE 373,253 for the same expiry, put OI zero, and every
near-the-money strike blank.
So the construction could not be validated - not because the math disagreed
but because there was nothing to compare against. From outside it is not
possible to tell free-tier degradation from their flow-signed methodology,
and finding out costs $1,499/month.
Verdict hardens: the free CBOE CDN is strictly better than Basic for this
project - complete chains, every expiry and strike, gamma and open interest
populated, unlimited, $0. Our own AAPL figures were internally coherent
(+0.929 Bn/1% total, Sep-18 expiry +0.154 Bn, near-money gammas 0.013-0.019).
GEX stays externally unvalidated; if that ever matters, use a different vendor.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pricing checked: Free $0 (5/day), Basic $79 (250/day), Growth $299 (2,500/day),
Alpha $1,499 (unlimited) - and the Historical API is ALPHA-EXCLUSIVE. Basic and
Growth serve live data only.
The archive was the only thing worth buying from this vendor, so nothing in
budget helps: Basic would spend $79/month to make a once-a-day snapshot 15
seconds fresh instead of 15 minutes. Not subscribing.
The free key keeps one genuine use: a single live call to compare their GEX
against our CBOE-computed number, validating the recorder formula against a
commercial implementation (sign and magnitude only - they sign strikes from
classified tape, we use the standard open-interest assumption).
Recorded the EV argument for future sessions: the recorder banks this history
for free in ~12 months, and on this project base rate most alt-data families
die at the incremental gate. Paying four figures to test GEX a year early is a
poor trade. If revisited, price bulk ARCHIVE sellers, not analytics APIs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Free tier is 5 requests per DAY, so the quota is reserved rather than spent:
one request answers whether a historical timestamp returns the whole chain or
one expiration, and that decides whether backfilling 2018->now is ~2,100
requests (GEX screenable now) or infeasible (compare bulk vendors instead).
Deliberately NOT an EA input, unlike FRED/EIA: the EA must never depend on a
paid, rate-limited vendor in its live path. Research-side backfill only, so the
key lives in the gitignored Market Data\altdata\keys.json plus this backup.
Auth is an X-Api-Key HEADER, not a query parameter - worth noting because the
EA's HttpGet currently sends no headers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
EIA (user directive: "the NN might find patterns in it for both oil and regular
symbols"). Weekly Petroleum Status Report via the v2 API - crude stocks ex-SPR,
field production, refinery utilization - three features (1y percentile, 4w
change, utilization) on EVERY catalog symbol, not just oil. EIA screened NULL on
WTI's short 7y sample, so these ship as EXPLORATORY inputs: the deploy gate, not
the screen, decides whether a model trained on them trades. Publication stamp
observed+6d mirrors research/altdata/eia.py.
Symbol handling was hardcoded to three if-blocks; it is now a catalog of 24
instruments x alias lists covering The5ers/FTMO/AvaTrade/Dukascopy/OANDA/IC
Markets naming, with prefix matching for the broker suffix zoo (US500.cash,
XAUUSDm, EURUSD.r). Adding an instrument is one AddSpec row. COT caches are
named by CANONICAL so two brokers' names for one contract share a download.
Unrecognised symbol -> a chart dialog (Panel\AltDataMapDialog.mqh, CAppDialog +
dropdown) asks which instrument it is; the answer persists in symbol_map.cfg and
"No alternative data" is a recorded choice, not a nag. Non-blocking by design:
an unmapped symbol contributes 0 features and must never hold up a chart.
Also: UrlEncodePart now escapes '%' - SoQL like-predicates use it as the
wildcard and an unescaped one corrupts the query; docs/ gains the whitelist
URLs, an API-key backup, and the catalog reference.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
