AlphaVantage static data provider

Modified on 2020/09/11 07:15 by Administrator — Categorized as: Providers

What it is

This is a Wealth-Lab static and fundamental provider for free intraday and daily data for U.S. stocks, Forex and cryptocurrencies by AlphaVantage. The EOD data spans 20 years while the intraday data is limited depending on bar scale (1-minute: 1 week, 5-minute: 4 weeks, 15-, 30-minute: 6 weeks, 60-minute: less than 3 months for stocks and less than a month for Forex).

IMPORTANT NOTE for the FREE Service
The free service permits only 5 historical requests per minute. This is sufficient for viewing charts with on-demand updates, but will not work to update even a small DataSet using the Data Manager, which will attempt hundreds of requests every minute. In this case only the first 5 symbol requests will update and the rest will fail.

If you're familiar with the built-in Yahoo! provider, you're going to get common with the Alphavantage provider very quickly. Its features include:


Setting it up

Before you're able to download any data, follow these steps:

  1. Install the extension and restart WLP/D
  2. Get your free API key at AlphaVantage.co or subscribe and get a premium key at AlphaVangtage Premium
  3. Copy and paste your API key (no typing !) on the Data Manager's AlphaVantage tab

Provider tab in Data Manager

Provider tab in Data Manager


Forex

Forex symbols must have FFF/TTT format, where FFF stands for From-Symbol and TTT stands for To-Symbol, for example: EUR/USD, USD/CHF etc.

Cryptocurrencies

We tested cryptos with FFF-TTT format, where FFF stands for From-Symbol and TTT stands for To-Symbol, for example: BTC-USD.

Working with Dividends

The fundamental provider may return split-adjusted dividends for a chart's dividend popup as well as when accessing the "Dividend (Alphavantage)" fundamental item in Strategy code. While the dividend adjustment factor maintains proper percentage relationships between prices, it's possible that new dividends affect previous backtest results (trades) for some strategies. Disable "Apply dividends" in the Backtest Settings Preferences when using dividend-adjusted data for backtesting. If you don't, the dividend effect might be duplicated in the Performance results, especially for the Buy & Hold Strategy.

Data Editing

To edit bar data, open a chart and either:
  1. double-click the bar to edit, or,
  2. right-click the bar and select Edit Bar Data.

When editing data, be aware of the Perform Dividend Adjustment selection since the chart values will reflect this adjustment. Deselect this option and refresh the chart to edit raw price and volume.

With the "Ignore splits and dividends which fall out of the range" option selected (disabled by default), only deleting bars is possible.

Issues and Limitations