I completely understand Kever's frustration.
We also had a hard time finding inexpensive historical data for our quantitative analysis. There are many options, but the price was usually out of our range. At the end, we were considering these data providers:
1. eSignal
- About $110 per month
- Lots of historical data: 12 years for stocks and 3 years for futures and forex
The problem is that you can only download data using their Qcharts or eSignal platform. There is no easy and reliable way to collect and export bars to any external storage such as ASCII csv file. If you download quotes for a few years and then try to use the export feature, the software crashes.
Like Kever said, third-party software is unable to access eSignal extended data. Their API restricts access to the complete database and only allows 120 days of 1 minute bars and 10 days of tick data.
For more information about historical data you can get from eSignal, visit this web page:
http://kb.esignalcentral.com/article.asp?article=1203&p=1
2. IQFeed
- Their basic service is $60 per month
- You can download their entire historical database using software like QCollector
Although access to their data is not restricted to third-party applications, like with eSignal, the problem with IQFeed is that they only have less than 3 years of stock and futures data and forex data goes back to 2005.
You can get more information about IQFeed data on this page:
http://www.iqfeed.net/QCollector/index.cfm?displayaction=data§ion=services
3. Kibot
We finally ended up purchasing data from Kibot. We were able to get all stocks in DOW 30 for only $150. Their data goes back to 1998. With our 1 minute data purchase we also received the daily, end-of-day quotes for free. They also have a data update service which we did not purchase for now since the quarterly updates are free.
Their web site address is
http://www.kibot.com/
I hope this helps.
Biba