CSI Data

What it is

CSI Data — Commodity Systems, Inc. of Boca Raton, Florida — sells end-of-day market data through Unfair Advantage, a Windows application that keeps a compressed database on your own disk, refreshes it daily from CSI's servers, and exports into whatever charting or backtesting software you run. No REST endpoint, no JSON, no Python package: you buy a Windows program and the data held inside it.

The dated-looking site invites the wrong conclusion. The published build log runs roughly monthly through 27 August 2026 (version 2.10.8, build 1098), the licence agreement carries a December 2025 revision, and at 11:33 ET on 14 September 2026 the posting-status page had that morning's Asia release marked delivered and every later slot still pending — the daily schedule running on time.

Pricing

Two ladders plus a fee that is easy to miss. Silver bills monthly or annually and carries five years of history monthly, ten annually, from $24/mo for a five-futures-five-stocks-five-funds Budget Market Mix up to $79.50/mo for world futures. Gold is annual only and buys thirty years, $639 to $1,889. On top of either sits a one-time licensing fee of $30 to $400 that is explicitly non-refundable, and extra history is charged per year again.

The trial is 21 days for $20 rather than free. History-only orders skip updates altogether — $400 for twenty years of NYSE stocks — and leave one month to export the files before access ends.

Data & coverage

End of day only, with no real-time or intraday product at any price. Depth is the reason to be here: CSI's own Chicago Board of Trade factsheet, downloaded 14 September 2026, returns wheat beginning 1922-01-03 and corn 1946-01-02, both current through 2026-09-11, the last completed session. The NYSE factsheet holds 17,002 series, with Altria, Chevron and BP starting 1962-01-02.

Breadth reaches most of the 110+ futures exchanges worldwide: roughly 1,400 active futures series, 80,000 stocks across the US, Canada and the UK, 20,000+ mutual funds, roughly 160 FX and 70 crypto cross-rates, options on stock indices and 190+ futures, and Briese's Commitments of Traders series.

The continuous contract is what CSI is actually bought for, and it builds eight: back-adjusted, forward-adjusted, proportionally back-adjusted, Nth nearest for a value of N you choose, the time-weighted and open-interest-weighted Perpetual Contract (CSI's own trademark), the Proportional Liquidity Perpetual, and Gann. Roll timing is yours to specify — calendar date, trading days relative to the delivery month, days before expiry, or thresholds on volume, open interest or both. Nothing else in this category exposes that many knobs.

Integrations

Export is file-based: CSI's own format, MetaStock, ASCII and Excel, with xlsx added in January 2026. Preconfigured portfolios ship for Trading Blox, Trading System Lab and RealTest, and 2026 builds added AmiBroker export settings and nearest-futures-group contracts to TradingBlox catalog files. Custom studies and scanner indicators are written in VBScript, JScript, Perl or CSI's own AnyLanguage.

Limitations

• Windows only, and still a 32-bit application whose stated requirements span Windows 98 through 11. A virtual machine counts as a separate licensed device, so a Mac or Linux workaround costs a second licence.
• Delisted stocks are off the menu. The order form says they are no longer offered through the application and are a premium annual add-on arranged by email at an unpublished price; inactive futures are excluded from every package. The data plainly exists — 9,659 of the 17,002 NYSE series in CSI's own factsheet are inactive — but a survivorship-bias-free backtest starts with a phone call, not a checkbox.
• Licensed, never owned. Miss updates for two months and the licence is revoked and the software disabled. Redistribution, resale and multi-user use are prohibited, and CSI states that exported files are encoded to identify the source account.
• Refunds are narrow: licensing fees, extra history and options history are all non-refundable, and early cancellation is short-rated at double the monthly fee per month.
• No single-stock options — futures options and stock index options only, the latter through a separate FTP product at $125 per year per underlying.
• Daily throughput is capped at 49 to 150 futures markets and 7,500 to 10,000 equities depending on tier, a real ceiling for a wide cross-sectional scan.

Alternatives

Norgate Data is the closest comparison and the better buy if survivorship bias is the whole point: delisted securities and historical index membership are a priced tier rather than a phone call, though its futures history is shallower. Kibot and FirstRate Data sell files outright instead of renting them. AlgoSeek and Databento go to intraday and tick rather than daily bars.

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