Tick Data

What it is

Tick Data has sold historical intraday prices since 1984, which makes it the oldest vendor in this corner of the catalogue by more than a decade. You buy symbol-years — a set of symbols over a date range — under a perpetual licence, and updates afterwards are a separate annual subscription. Delivery is comma-delimited ASCII through TickWrite, the vendor's own downloader and time-series builder, which maps a company through its symbol changes, rolls futures into continuous contracts, adjusts for corporate actions and writes bars at any interval and time zone.

What it has that FirstRate Data, Kibot and AlgoSeek do not is the rest of the world: roughly thirty equity markets on five continents, against a US-only archive at AlgoSeek and a US-plus-a-few-index-tickers one at FirstRate. The company is Tick Data, LLC of Hoboken, New Jersey. OneMarketData bought it in November 2015 and itself merged with KX — whose kdb+ has a card here — in September 2025; the store, the software and the licence are still Tick Data's.

Pricing

Published, but not on the pages that talk about pricing. Those give only the minimums — $1,000 for a new client, $500 for a returning one — and point at a fee-estimate calculator. The store itself prints a rate card for every market: US equities at $32 a symbol-year for Level I quotes and trades, futures and indices at $180, spot FX at $160, OPRA options at $1,000 with quotes or $700 trades-only. Whole markets are priced too, from $30,000 for every futures symbol back to 1974 to $129,100 for US equities. Volume discounts, branded PICK, have a different threshold in each market — 10 and 30 symbol-years for options, 15 and 30 for futures, 100, 250 and 500 for equities and FX. A Delivery Support Fee and sales tax sit on top, and there is no free tier.

TickAPI is priced separately, and its tiers sit on the marketing site rather than in the store. A one-year commitment with a $250 monthly minimum, billed on unique symbol-months: global equities at $2.33 each for the first 600, falling through ten tiers to $0.20 above 300,000; futures, index and FX from $2.00 to $0.26; plus $0.03 per request and a $250 annual Delivery Support Fee. The vendor's worked example is twenty equities over three years — 720 symbol-months — at $1,638.03. Re-requesting data you already paid for in the same billing cycle costs the three cents and nothing more.

Data & coverage

Everything is Level I. US equities start on 1 January 1993 across NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ and the other CTA participants, delivered as trades, Level I quotes and one-minute trade bars — but the derived NBBO file, and the one-minute quote bars built from it, go back only to 1 January 2004, so the first eleven years are per-exchange quotes with no consolidated best bid and offer. Every other market carries its own start date, and they are recent by comparison: London January 2000, Euronext April 2002, Germany 2003, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Brazil 2008, India's NSE 2012, Shanghai, Tel Aviv and Johannesburg 2015.

Futures are the deep archive: 310 symbols across 38 exchanges in the vendor's own symbol list, 256 of them still updating, with trade data starting 2 December 1974 for the CME German Mark, Swiss Franc, Live Cattle, Pork Bellies and Lumber contracts. The caveats are all dated — quotes only from 4 January 2010, millisecond timestamps from July 2011, electronic and overnight sessions from July 2003, before which there is no trade volume at all. Spot FX is 2,000-plus pairs from 1 May 2008, quotes only, contributed by 95 or more banks rather than an exchange. Options are the thin spot: US trades from 16 November 2020, with Level I quotes for SPY, SPX, RUT and VIX and nothing else.

Order every symbol in a market and inactive companies come with it, so the equity and options sets can be made survivorship-bias-free. Corporate actions ship as separate files for splits, dividends, mergers and company information — mergers being the one FirstRate does not carry.

Integrations

Four routes in: TickWrite 7 on Windows or Linux, TickWrite Web in a browser, TickAPI as /stream and /download calls from any language, and Deep History synced from the vendor's S3 buckets in us-east-1 for clients already inside AWS. Output is delimited text, so Excel, R, MATLAB, kdb+ and anything else reads it without a connector. There is no Python package, no MCP server and no platform plugin. Orders too large to download arrive on an external hard drive for a fee.

Limitations

• The rate card exists but is buried in the store; the pages that discuss pricing publish only a calculator and the minimums. The floor is $1,000 for a new client — roughly what FirstRate charges for its entire tick bundle, and about thirty symbol-years of US equity quotes here.
• The licence, printed in the TickWrite 7.1 user guide dated April 2018, grants perpetual internal business use only. Distributing, renting or sublicensing the data is forbidden, as is any service that lets third parties reach it; derived works are publishable only if the underlying data cannot be extracted from them.
• Level I everywhere. No market-by-price, no market-by-order, no book, for any asset class.
• Options history begins in November 2020 and quote data covers four symbols. Anyone researching options before that date needs a different vendor.
• Update files are deleted from the server after thirty days and cost a re-processing fee to retrieve again. Update subscriptions auto-renew at the undiscounted list price.
• The futures archive thins with age exactly where a long backtest wants it: no volume before July 2003, day session only, and 11 months of history per contract month.
• Daily bars are aggregated from the ticks and will not match official exchange end-of-day figures. The vendor says so plainly and sells no official EOD series.
• No fundamentals, no news, no crypto, no live feed — the company stopped collecting over a real-time feed in 2001.

Alternatives

AlgoSeek is the closer comparison on rigour — US only and rented rather than bought, from $1,500 a month, but it prints a full rate card and has a real futures order book. FirstRate Data and Kibot are one to two orders of magnitude cheaper for US intraday history you own outright, and are the right answer unless the missing piece is non-US equities or pre-2000 futures. Databento bills by the gigabyte with no minimum; Norgate Data does daily bars with index membership instead of ticks. The rest of the field is in market data APIs.