Data Feed
Also known as: market data feed, price feed, quote feed, tick feed
What is it?
A data feed is the stream of prices your platform, indicator or bot actually reads - and it is one vendor's version of the market, not the market itself. Spot forex has no central exchange, so there is no single true price. Each broker assembles a feed from the liquidity providers it has relationships with, then applies its own filtering and markup.
How a price reaches your bot - and why it is one vendor's version
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1
Providers quote
Banks and market makers stream their own bids and offers. No two see the same flow, so no two quote alike.
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2
Your broker builds its own book
It aggregates only the providers it deals with, filters outliers and adds a markup. That composite becomes its price.
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3
Your bot reads that feed
Every indicator and backtest runs on this stream, not on the market. Change broker and the same rule fires elsewhere.
Two brokers can legitimately print EUR/USD at 1.08420 and 1.08435 in the same instant, and a 15-minute candle can close two points apart on each. Feeds also differ in granularity: some deliver every tick, others deliver one snapshot per second, which changes what a high or low even means. For anything automated, that turns the feed into part of the strategy rather than a neutral pipe.
A rule that fires when price closes one pip above a level will fire at different moments on two accounts, and a backtest run on your charting platform's history is not a test of the broker feed your bot will trade on. When a live system underperforms its backtest and the logic checks out, the feed is the next place to look.
Why it matters: Every broker builds its own price feed, so the same strategy can fire at different moments on two accounts and the feed becomes part of the edge.
The feed decides which bars, highs and lows your rules ever see, so it can change entries without any change to the strategy.
Real-world example
During one high-impact release a 15-minute EUR/USD candle closed at 1.08420 on one broker's feed and 1.08442 on another - enough to trigger a breakout entry on one account and leave the other flat.
How SignalBots handles it
SignalBots generates each signal from one reference feed and timestamps it in UTC, so what your platform shows can be reconciled against exactly what fired and when. See /risk-warning.
Pro tip
Backtest on the feed you will trade on. A strategy validated against one vendor's history and deployed against another broker's live prices has not really been validated.
Common pitfalls
Blaming the bot for a missed entry when the broker's feed simply never printed the price the signal was built on.
Frequently asked questions
Why do two brokers show different prices for the same pair?
Because spot forex is decentralised. Each broker aggregates quotes from its own set of liquidity providers and adds its own markup, so the composite it publishes is genuinely its own price rather than a shared one.
Does a better data feed improve my results?
It removes a class of problem rather than adding an edge. A cleaner, higher-granularity feed means fewer phantom spikes and fewer missed bars, but it does not make a strategy profitable and your capital is still at risk.
What is the difference between tick data and bar data?
Tick data records every individual price update, while bar data compresses a period into open, high, low and close. Bar data is far smaller but hides the order in which the high and low occurred, which matters when a backtest has to decide whether a stop or a target was hit first.
Can I use one broker's feed and trade on another?
Technically yes, and some traders do, but you take on the difference between the two as a permanent source of slippage. The signal is computed on prices your executing account never actually saw.
Why does my backtest use different candles than my live chart?
Most likely the historical dataset and the live stream come from different sources, or the history has been cleaned of spikes the live feed will still deliver. Comparing the two on the same day usually makes the gap obvious.
Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Historical and backtested results do not guarantee future performance. Read the full risk warning.
