Instruments
Upvest offers you endpoints for querying instruments and instrument prices. As the prices are linked to an exchange, you can, for example, track where the prices are available and in what quality.
With this guide, you will learn how to access instruments and price data via the Investment API and how to handle specific instrument-related use cases, such as instrument onboarding, delisting and trading bans.
Before we go into depth and explain the implementation of instruments in the Upvest Investment API step by step, we encourage you to study the essential terms and concepts so that a general understanding and smooth implementation can be achieved.
If you are already familiar with these, you can jump straight into the implementation guide.
How do instruments & instrument prices work?
A financial instrument in the Upvest platform is currently either an ETF, a mutual fund or a stock.
Upvest makes its activated instrument trading universe continuously available and reflects all possible changes. The instrument trading universe contains a list of all available instruments supported by Upvest. You can query them and select the instruments that you have agreed for your specific use cases.
Definitions
In this section, you will learn some of the key definitions related to the /instruments endpoint, such as which data can be retrieved via the endpoint and what the term data owner means.
Instrument price quality
Instrument price data is available in different qualities and costs depending on the data owner. Upvest distinguishes between the following price data qualities:
End-of-day Only one price quotation per trading day.
Real-time (i.e. near real-time) The maximum delay from the order booking/execution at the trading venue is a few seconds. This data type is usually considered 'Level 1 real-time data'.
Delayed The same data as real-time data, but with a deliberately introduced delay. The standard delay time is 15 minutes.
Please note that in live mode we provide the latest prices that we receive from our data provider. However, it is to be expected that such updates will only take place on trading days.
OHLC prices
Upvest defines price histories as a set of information about historical price changes of a specific instrument at a specific trading venue.
Price histories usually consist of OHLC (opening, high, low and closing) prices as well as the respective trading volumes of a given day.
An Open-High-Low-Close chart (OHLC) is a type of chart that is normally used to show price movements of a financial instrument over time, e.g. a day or an hour. This gives us much more information about the trading activity. In general, the OHLC chart is well designed to assess how volatile the price is, what the trends are, etc.
Trading venues
Trading venues are the market on which the transaction in the instruments takes place. Examples of trading venues within the meaning of this definition are regulated exchanges, OTC (Over-the-counter) trading partners or multilateral trading systems.
The Investment API enables access to price data for the following stock exchanges:
- Tradegate
- Xetra
- Quotrix
- Gettex
- Lang & Schwarz
Data provider
We work with various data providers so that we can offer the best possible and tailored data, according to the needs of our clients. In this process, the provider make the following functions available: collecting, normalising and distributing data sets from data owners to authorised users.
Please note that our external partners may reserve time slots for their maintenance and minor service interruptions may therefore occur occasionally.
Data owner
Data owners (e.g. exchanges for price data, data vendors for reference data, ESG (environmental, social & governance) providers, etc.). The data owners define their own data usage conditions for the data set they sell.