Which price feed should a prop firm use?
Quick answer
Use a feed from an established source with continuous coverage of your instruments, realistic spreads and good uptime, for example a major platform's feed, a broker or a market data vendor. Check symbol coverage, trading hours, history for charts, and whether the feed's licence permits prop use.
Detailed answer
What to evaluate:
- Coverage: every instrument you want to offer.
- Spreads: raw market spreads, not marked up.
- Reliability: gaps or freezes can cause disputed breaches.
- History: enough to draw meaningful charts.
- Licence: permitted use for simulated accounts.
- Cost: included in the platform or separate.
PropExecutor uses a live cTrader feed at raw spreads, covering major and cross currency pairs, several exotics, gold, silver, oil, natural gas, major stock indices, Bitcoin and Ether, with chart history back to 2000 for forex and metals.
Monitoring the feed
Watch for stale prices, gaps and unusual spikes, and have a policy for reviewing breaches that happen during feed problems. A short incident log helps answer trader questions later.
Instruments and hours
Check that each instrument's trading hours on the feed match what you tell traders, especially for indices and energies, which have breaks during the day.
PropExecutor team · Updated
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