Cboe
No signup
One of the main US options exchanges. Delayed two-sided quotes and full option chains with greeks, refreshed as often as you like. Most of your prices come from here before you add anything.
PowersWATCHOMONALLQMKT
BRINGING IN DATA
How to use your API keys
Plenty of the terminal runs without one. Quotes, filings, rates and fundamentals need no key, no account and no card. Everything past that is a key you own: free ones that take a few minutes each, and paid ones you may already hold.
Cboe
SEC EDGAR
Yahoo Finance
FINRA
Federal Reserve
IMF
Nothing to paste. Open it for the first time and you already have quotes for your tickers, the whole Treasury yield curve, every filing a company has made, and a full profile of any listed company.
Each card lists the panel codes it switches on. A code is what you type to open a panel: WATCH is your watchlist, OMON the option chain, MKT the market board. The user guide names every one.
Yahoo Finance
No signup
Daily and intraday bars, quotes, company profiles, fundamentals and news, plus the screener you search names with.
PowersWATCHGPMKTRAIL
SEC EDGAR
No signup
Every filing any US public company has ever made, every form type, searchable in full, plus who owns the shares and who is buying and selling. Ten requests a second, and no daily cap.
PowersSECFINSDOWNCFFA
FINRA
No signup
Weekly off-exchange and dark-pool volume, and short interest. No paid plan gets it any sooner.
PowersEDGETAPE
Federal Reserve
No signup
Treasury rates, the yield curve, and the Fed’s own balance sheet.
PowersYASBTMMECO
IMF
No signup
Economic data for most countries in the world, plus a daily count of ships calling at the major ports.
PowersPORTSECO
Your portfolios, watchlists, layouts, alerts and chat rooms are saved and follow you to another Mac. Signing in is free, and there is nothing to paste for it.
A key is a short code a provider gives you when you sign up, so they know the data is going to you. Each of these takes a form, an email and a few minutes. Nothing to cancel, and each one lights up panels that sit empty without it.
FRED
Free key
The St. Louis Fed’s 800,000-plus macro series, with no daily cap. It is the backbone of everything economic here. Sharpe and Sortino need it too, for the risk-free rate behind them.
PowersECOHSNGBTMMYAS
Get a FRED keyAlpaca Markets
Free key
The strongest free market data here. Free gives you prices from every US exchange (the full consolidated tape) 15 minutes delayed, at 200 requests a minute with no daily cap. Alpaca issues two values, a key and a secret, and Settings has a row for each. The account also includes paper trading, and AUM shows those positions without ever placing an order.
PowersMKTRAILWATCHTAPETAS
Get an Alpaca keyFinnhub
Free key
Quotes, company news and a live trade stream, at 60 requests a minute with no daily cap. Analyst price targets and earnings-call transcripts are not on the free tier.
PowersWATCHNEWSRESINSDIPOFA
Get a Finnhub keyEIA
Free key
The US Energy Information Administration: oil, natural gas, the power grid and renewables. Every series, no daily cap.
PowersNRGCMDTY
Get an EIA keyBureau of Labor Statistics
Free key
Inflation (CPI) and the monthly jobs report. Registering is the whole upgrade: it lifts you from 25 to 500 queries a day and opens 20 years of history on each series.
PowersECOECAL
Get a BLS keyTiingo
Free key
Daily and intraday price history, crypto, and a live price stream, at 500 requests an hour. On the free tier, fundamentals cover the Dow 30 only and news is not included.
PowersFAGPFXC
Get a Tiingo keyOne to leave until later: Financial Modeling Prep is the only key here capped per day, so once a free day is spent it stays spent until midnight UTC. Get the free keys above first.
Open Settings
Type SET in the command line at the top of the window, then choose the Data tab.
Find the source
Every source that takes a key has a row. Rows without one say Not set and sit at the top. The sources that need no key are not listed, because there is nothing to enter. If you do not have a key yet, Get a key opens that provider’s signup page for you.
Paste it and save
Paste the key into that row’s box and press Save. A few providers give you two values rather than one: Alpaca is the common case, and it has a second row labelled API secret that has to be saved too. The key takes effect at once, and a panel that was waiting on it fills in on its next refresh.
Check it
Check tests the key against the provider and shows the answer beside the button: OK, or INVALID KEY, PLAN LIMIT or QUOTA SPENT with the reason underneath. It only runs when you click it, so nothing is spent from your allowance in the background.
Where your keys live
On your Mac, in the app’s own settings folder. They are never sent to us and they never leave the machine. Nothing in the app can read a saved key back, not even the settings screen. It shows the last four characters and nothing more. Show in Finder opens the folder.
A key goes to that one provider and nowhere else. To remove one, press Clear and then Confirm clear.
When a number is not available, you get the reason instead of the number. Never a zero, never a stand-in, never a guess. Ask an economics panel for something it has no key for, and this is exactly what it says:
FRED needs an API key. Add one in Settings, on the Data tab.
EIA Open Data needs an API key. Add one in Settings, on the Data tab.
A missing key never empties a whole panel. Open the economics dashboard without a FRED key and the Treasury, New York Fed and Federal Reserve Board figures are all still there. Only the series that need FRED sit blank, each one saying so, so you always know which key would fill them.
If you already pay for market data, bring it. The prices below are the vendors’ own, quoted as they publish them. Where a vendor sells by quote instead, you will need to ask them for a number.
Picked up on their ownnothing to switch on
Alpaca, Algo Trader Plus
Paid
$99/mo, free plan $0/mo
Real-time consolidated quotes and prints across every US exchange, instead of that same tape 15 minutes late. It is the largest real-time pricing upgrade available here. Your plan is read from the key itself and the best feed it can have is the one you get, so there is no setting to find afterwards.
Tiingo Power
Paid
$30/mo, free plan $0/mo
A bigger request budget, and history back 15 years or more instead of 5. It does not widen fundamentals past the Dow 30: Tiingo sells that as a separate add-on and quotes it by email, so paying for Power to reach one more company’s fundamentals would not work.
Financial Modeling Prep
Paid
A paid plan lifts the daily cap, which is the real reason to buy it, and opens up institutional holders and news. Their price is on their own page.
PowersHDSNEWSEQS
FMP plansBenzinga
Paid
Analyst ratings and price targets with the firm names on them, and low-latency news. There is no free tier and no listed price: they sell by quote. Without it you still get ratings from Finnhub and news from the free sources.
PowersRESNEWSECAL
Benzinga APIShippingfour you can bring
The shipping map runs on free Nordic feeds and hatches the rest of the world. Coastal AIS reaches 40 to 60 nautical miles from a receiver, and open ocean needs satellites, so that gap is physics rather than a missing key. A paid subscription can close part of it. Each of these is off until you set its key.
MarineTraffic (Kpler)
Priced by quote
Coastal and satellite reception, with every position tagged which of the two it came from, so you can see whether you are genuinely getting satellite coverage. Billed per position returned. The area comes from what your subscription covers, not from the part of the map you are looking at.
VesselFinder
Priced by quote
A fixed monthly subscription priced by area size and traffic density, so refreshing more often does not raise the bill. The area is fixed when you buy and cannot be changed afterwards.
Datalastic
Prices on their own site
One port or one strait at a time. It answers a circle of at most 50 nautical miles, so it also has to be told where to watch. Good for the Singapore Strait, wrong tool for an ocean.
MyShipTracking
1 credit per vesselreturned
The only one of the four that answers for the area you are actually looking at, and the only one that publishes per-call pricing: 1 credit per vessel returned, 3 with extended detail switched on, and nothing at all for an empty area. Cost follows how many ships are in view rather than how often you ask, so a busy strait is dearer than a quiet ocean.
Whichever you bring, the map lights only where ships were actually seen, never the area you were sold. A coastal plan lights a coastline, and you can tell at a glance how much of the ocean your subscription is really reaching.
Every key stays yours
A panel that needs a key tells you which one, so you only ever add the ones you actually use. Nothing here expires. Any key you get is your own account with that provider, and it keeps working everywhere else you use it.
Every source in the terminal, and what each one is doing right now, is listed under SYS inside the app.