Market data feeds explained: guides for brokers and developers

A market data feed is a continuous stream of prices that a trading platform, broker or website receives from a data provider, instead of requesting every quote separately. FinaQuotes is a market data feed: ticks for stocks, forex, crypto, metals, commodities, indices and bonds stream over WebSocket, while candle history and the instrument catalogue are served over REST. A feed differs from a one-off API call in that the connection stays open, and each new price arrives as soon as it is received, usually within a fraction of a second.

In the FinaQuotes feed, US stocks, forex, crypto, metals, commodities, indices and bonds arrive in real time, and stocks from non-US exchanges arrive with a delay of about 15 minutes. The delay follows the terms under which exchanges allow their data to be redistributed. The free website widgets add one more rule: stocks, indices, commodities and bonds are shown 15 minutes late, while crypto, forex and metals stay real time. Widgets refresh every 15 seconds on Free and every 5 seconds on Pro; that is how often the page redraws, not how old the data is.

Bid/ask is a two-sided quote: the bid is the best price a buyer offers, the ask is the best price a seller accepts, and the gap between them is the spread. Last price is the price of the most recent trade or the latest calculated value of an instrument. FinaQuotes delivers level 1 bid/ask on forex, spot metals and US stocks, where the market is quoted on both sides, and last price on crypto, non-US stocks, indices, commodities and bonds; delayed prices in the free widgets are always a single last price. Platforms usually show the first kind in a quote table with a spread column and the second as a single price with its daily change.

Most market data integrations use both: WebSocket for live prices and REST for data that is requested once. A WebSocket connection stays open and pushes every new tick for the instruments you subscribe to, which is what a chart, a quote table or an alerting system needs. REST answers single requests: candle history when a chart opens, the instrument catalogue and logos. A typical client loads history over REST, then subscribes over WebSocket and keeps the latest candle current from live ticks. REST is rate-limited per IP; WebSocket has no per-message billing.

FinaQuotes builds candles on the server from a 1-minute base: each 1-minute candle records the open, high, low and close of the ticks inside that minute, and the higher timeframes, 5m, 15m, 30m, 1H, 4H, 1D, 1W and 1MN, are aggregated from it. Every timestamp is in UTC, so candles from different markets line up and nothing shifts when a country moves to daylight saving time. Stock candles are built only inside the trading hours of the listing exchange, which follow its local daylight saving schedule.

The quickest way to add live quotes to a website is a free FinaQuotes widget: choose a market watch table, ticker tape, symbol card, market overview or mini chart, set the instruments and colors in the builder, and paste the generated code into your page. No account is needed, and one widget holds up to 30 instruments. The free version runs in an iframe and carries a small by FinaQuotes line. For a native, white-label build with every asset class in real time, request Widgets Pro.

FinaQuotes is neither a broker nor a liquidity provider; it is market data infrastructure. It delivers quotes and candles to brokers, prop firms, trading platforms and websites, but it does not execute trades, hold client funds, act as a counterparty or give investment advice. Prices in the feed are indicative: they describe the market, but they are not firm quotes anyone is obliged to trade at. A broker uses them for display and routes execution through its own liquidity provider.