Financial Data

Sentient Trader performs an analysis and make trading decisions on the price data of any tradable instrument. In order to do this it requires data, which is a record of the price at which the instrument traded at any particular time.

Financial data is available in many different formats and types.

Types of financial data:

EOD: stands for End-Of-Day data, which means that each piece of data represents the trading that took place during the course of that day. At the end of each day on which trading occurs, there is new data available.
Intraday: there are many different resolutions of intraday data available, ranging from tick data, which is one piece of data for every single trade that occurs, up to several hours compressed into one piece of data. The intraday resolutions that Sentient Trader works with are:
- 4 x hour: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 4 hours of trading.
- 1 x hour: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 1 hour of trading.
- 30 x minute: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 30 minutes of trading (for various reasons this resolution of data is not used often).
- 15 x minute: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 15 minutes of trading.
- 10 x minute: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 10 minutes of trading (for various reasons this resolution of data is also not used often).
- 5 x minute: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 5 minutes of trading.
- 3 x minute: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 3 minutes of trading (for various reasons this resolution of data is also not used often).
- 1 x minute: each piece of data (or bar on a chart) represents 1 minute of trading.
Live streaming data: this is data that is streamed to your computer by a data provider. Sentient Trader will receive the data, and compress it into the resolution of the charts that are receiving the live data. Note that although Sentient Trader can receive and work with live streaming tick data, it does not work with tick charts. The reason for this is that cyclic analysis is all about price moving in time, and tick charts have no time scale!

Because Sentient Trader performs an analysis over time, it requires some historical data which it uses for its cyclic analysis. Sentient Trader is different from most trading applications because of this requirement for fairly extensive historical data. Fortunately it seamlessly handles the merging of historical data with live streaming data so that with most data providers you won't even know it is doing this for you. Metatrader 4 is the one exception to this: you need to follow a few simple guidelines to make the transition seamless.

Sentient Trader can read many different formats of data:

ASCII data
Metastock data (historical only, not live streaming Metastock data yet)
Metatrader 4 data (historical and live streaming data from the MT4 trading platform)
IB data: from Interactive Brokers, using their Traders Workstation (both historical and live streaming data, but note that IB limit historical data provided to third party applications to a maximum of one year).
DTN IQfeed data (both historical and live streaming data)
Ninja Trader (both historical and live streaming data)

The integration with Ninja Trader is particularly exciting because of two reasons:

Ninja Trader gives you access to free EOD data via their partner KineTick. This means that you can load free EOD data for analysis into Sentient Trader.
Ninja Trader connects to many other data providers (and they have a deal with IB to access more than one year of historical data!) This means that through Ninja Trader you can access a very wide range of data for Sentient Trader.

Getting Started Roadmap for Trader Edition

Getting Started Roadmap for Analyst Edition