How much money are you spending on backtesting data?
u/smohyee ·
Reddit — r/algotrading
· June 17, 2026 at 21:16
· ⬆ 15 pts
· 💬 26 comments
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AI Summary
Summary
The author discusses the cost and necessity of high-quality backtesting data, contrasting Alpaca's limited historical options data with Databento's expensive NBBO datasets.
Thesis: Reliable backtesting is essential for strategy validation, but the expense of premium data (e.g., NBBO) may not be justified until a promising hypothesis is found.
Quality assessment: This is speculative discussion and general advice-seeking, not well-researched DD. It contains no specific investment thesis or data-backed analysis.
Score15
Comments26
Upvote %86%
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I'm new to this game, and one of the lessons I'm picking up on is that your ability to confirm the value of a hypothesis is only as good as your ability to backtest, and that depends heavily on having real, clean data that fits the hypothesis you're testing.
So far, I have only thrown money at a yearlong sub to Alpaca trader +, which gives limited historical options data, and doesn't include NBBO. That's, what, a hundred a month or so, no big deal.. but databento would want thousands of dollars for an NBBO data set. Obviously worth it if you find the holy grail, but I can imagine spending tens of thousands on various levels of data in various areas of the market, only to yield no fruit.
For those who have been at this or even achieved success, what data sets were the most valuable to you?