Tips & Best Practices
Recommended broker and data setups for your goals
Setup: If You Just Want to Manage Trades
If you only want to model and manage trades, with no historical analysis or backtesting:
- Live data: select Tradier or Interactive Brokers
- Historical (Stocks and Indices): None
- Historical (Options): None
Setup: Review Past Trades Without Paying for Data
If you want to manage and review past trades, don't need backtesting, and don't want to pay for historical data:
Tradier users
- Live data: Tradier
- Turn on Save Live Market Data
- Historical (Stocks and Indices): Saved Market Data
- Historical (Options): Saved Market Data
Interactive Brokers users
- Configure Interactive Brokers as your broker account
- Also open a Tradier account and select Tradier for live data
- Turn on Save Live Market Data
- Historical (Stocks and Indices): Saved Market Data
- Historical (Options): Saved Market Data
Why IBKR users still add Tradier: Saved Market Data is built by capturing a live feed in the background, and only Tradier's web API supports that, so Tradier handles the capture while Interactive Brokers handles your orders.
Setup: Extensive Backtesting
If you want to do extensive backtesting:
- Subscribe to Massive's Advanced plan
- Either keep the subscription, or import the data you need for your backtests into Saved Market Data and then cancel
Note: Stratsigma may impose storage limits or additional fees for storing large quantities of data at its discretion.