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Comment by dave_sullivan | Hacker News Reader

Re: the insufficient data sets problem, I've been surprised how hard it is to find large quantities of historical financial data. Decent sources of the data seem very expensive, and I'm surprised there isn't a startup out there that is tackling this well since I'd be willing to pay a decent amount of money for minute by minute or hour by hour tick data--but am finding most subscription prices crazy. Is this data really as hard to come by as it seems?

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Here are two relatively inexpensive options for tick-by-tick market data:

   * IQFeed
   http://www.iqfeed.net/dev/

   * Nanex
   http://www.nanex.net/historical.html

The Nanex data is more expensive and harder to work with, so you might want to start with the IQFeed data.

It's a situation where your average hedge fund can shell out the thousands of dollars per month for a full-access feed while individual investors are left hanging. Zack's used to offer reasonable prices for accessing fundamental data via their API but have since changed their pricing model to be more prohibitive to small timers.

Intra-day data is still a bitch but YCharts recently added a premium plan for $200/mo that seems to hit a nice sweet spot for individual investors that do serious trading for accessing fundamental data & analysis tools.

It is expensive as you know. The data is generally owned by exchanges and they see it as a major revenue source. On the other hand if you want it it is just a cost to play. Open data is not big in finance.

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