Dear IQFeed

I have a question with regards to the symbol limit. I am on the 500 symbols model which I understand as I am not allowed to watch more than 500 symbols simultanouesly. Furthermore it is not intended that I watch 500 symbols one minute and then afterwards unwatches these and start watching 500 new symbols.

But I would be happy if you could clarify how things are with regards to the historical download. Should I also respect a 500 symbols limit there (and how long should I wait before I can reset my imaginary counter) or would it be perfectly ok to receive historical ticks for the present pre-market a couple of minutes before open for, let's say 2000 symbols. I found an old post that is some what related, but I would like to know your current standing.

Thank you very much in advance.

Cheers, Peter

Peter,

We don't have specific limits set on historical data, but we do ask our customers to respect the symbol limit to ensure an overall positive experience for all of our customers. For the most part, this means limiting your stream and historical data requests to the symbol limit you are subscribed to. We don't allow customers to circumvent the symbol limit by programmatically watching and un-watching symbols, or cycling through symbols for historical tick data on a timed basis. If you need data on 2000 symbols, you should subscribe to our 1800 symbol option which will get you close to your needs. The best way to think of it is if you had a client application with charts and a watch list, how would you interface with that software. You might change watch lists periodically, or open new charts throughout the day, but you wouldn't continuously be doing this all day long. If you need to fill in your chart data to scan for the symbols you will be trading during the day, we ask that you do this outside of regular trading hours when servers will be more idle (ideally in the middle of the night). If you do this, make the requests only for the data you need (there is no need to request 100 days of tick data on the same symbols every day. Instead, you should be asking for 1 day of tick data and store it locally so the same data doesn't need to be requested again.

I hope this helps clarify.

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Jay Froscheiser
Vice President, Active Trader Products

Hi Jay

Thanks a lot for your reply.

What I get from your messages is that there is no limit but I should still behave responsible. What that means is that I should not loop symbols in the historical feed attempting to get around the symbol limit for streaming data and I should respect general bandwidth. Both very fair!

You are completely right in assuming that I during the day only would stream a few symbols (~20) and the question related to how I could get scan as wide a range of premarket data as possible.

All the best - and thanks for a great product, Peter