At QuantConnect, our goal is to provide you with the tools and data that will help you create high-performing algorithmic trading strategies. And with LEAN, our open-source trading engine, our community can conduct a robust research process and solely focus on what makes them unique: their alpha.

With that in mind, we are excited to share that we’ve launched a new initiative to help fulfill those goals: our alternative data program. Data vendors who integrate with us will provide free data for our quants, and will receive revenue every time an alpha is licensed in our Alpha Streams marketplace using their data.

We’re proud to share the first five data vendors who have signed on with our program: CoinAPI, PsychSignal, Smart Insider, Tiingo, and Trading Economics. We’ll continue to add new vendors over time, but here we’re breaking down the new data currently available for backtesting in LEAN.

CoinAPI - Cryptocurrency Markets

As the crypto markets have continued to mature, the opportunity for our community to generate alpha in a new and exciting asset class has grown. To support our users, it’s important to provide the best resources for building, backtesting, and deploying crypto-focused algorithmic trading strategies. With CoinAPI, which collects cryptocurrency data from hundreds of exchanges around the world, we know we can do exactly that. 

PsychSignal - Social Media

Today’s news cycle is faster than ever and sentiment analysis has become an integral piece of hypothesis development. To that end, our integration with PsychSignal will enable our community to monitor opinions and gain a sense of trends occurring in real time. PsychSignal helps investors make more informed decisions by providing social media and sentiment analysis data, which will give our community the opportunity to incorporate global sentiment into their algorithms.

Smart Insider - Insider Trading and Buyback Data

If a substantial shareholder in a company is buying or selling a significant amount of stock, that can be a predictive signal that something big is going to happen in the organization. Whenever insider trading is reported, Smart Insider provides clean, timely, and reliable data for you to use as a factor. They also provide share buyback data, generating an analysis of the announcement as a "Buyback Intentions" report in addition to tracking the amount and value after the fact.

Tiingo - Global News

News moves markets, and with data from Tiingo’s News API, our community will be able to quickly apply natural language processing technology to trading strategies. Your algorithms can leverage over 16 million articles from both financial and nontraditional news sources, reading and interpreting their headlines and summaries in real-time.

Trading Economics - Economic Indicators

Currently, it may be difficult for you to analyze economic conditions and fit them into your strategies. Trading Economics simplifies the information-gathering process by providing comprehensive data for the countries that use the top 10 most liquid currencies, including historical data for more than 20 million economic indicators, exchange rates, stock market indexes, government bond yields, and commodity prices.

Check out our documentation for the alternative data we support here. Happy coding!