How to Connect Crypto Data to Charting Tools

Updated June 7th 2023. Crypto traders who want to optimise their investment strategies need access to reliable and consistent crypto price APIs to track their entry/exit points, to screen for new opportunities, to backtest their strategies, and to analyze their portfolio performance.

What To Look For In A Cryptocurrency Market Data API

At Brave New Coin, customers ask us about using our cryptocurrency APIs in their charting tools and other applications. Although many of these charting applications claim to offer cryptocurrency market data, the reality is that the data is either inconsistent, lacks historical data (for backtesting) or is not always easily available. And while it should be possible to import third-party crypto data into these tools, customers report that it’s not always that simple.
Having spoken to a number of clients facing this same problem, we can offer some practical solutions:

First, customers can subscribe directly to our market data API services – Brave New Coin offers a range of different data endpoints, indices and historic data going back as far as 2014. As well as aggregated pricing and market cap data for spot markets, Brave New Coin can provide data on crypto derivatives, as well as selected order book and trade data, exchange-level data, plus reference data to classify the hundreds of crypto assets that trade on the 250 or so exchanges we track.

Once clients access a cryptocurrency market data API, they can run their queries according to their defined parameters, and retrieve the results and import them into the relevant charting tool. For example, the intraday price of BTC, the 24 OHLCV of ETH-USD, or the latest rate for XRP-JPY on BTSE.

Second, for customers who may only require end-of-day pricing data, Brave New Coin works with several API marketplaces to distribute our data to their subscribers. These vendors offer additional support and data formatting that are more suited to end users such as day traders.

Third, Brave New Coin provides pricing feeds and indices to traditional market data vendors and third party applications, so check with your supplier about how you can access data from Brave New Coin.

Recently, Brave New Coin spoke with Adrian Reid, who runs a crypto trading course as part of his investor education services, Enlightened Stock Trading. He recommends students subscribe to the Brave New Coin data via Nasdaq Data Link, one of the crypto API marketplaces mentioned above. Since he also uses charting tools in his classes and in his own analysis, and because some of his students require a bit more help in setting up their data sources, Adrian has put together this handy ‘how to’ guide for importing the Brave New Coin data into Amibroker, via the Nasdaq Data Link service:

Steps to import BNC data into Amibroker

Be sure you are using Amibroker (and not Amiquote) for these purposes.

1. Download the single CSV file from the Nasdaq Data Link website
   

2. Open Amibroker, and create a new database specifically for the BNC data.
   

3. Use the Amibroker Import Wizard to Import the BNC Cryptocurrency Data
   The steps are: File > Import Wizard > Pick Files > Select the CSV File
   

4. Click Next

5. Set the column mapping correctly:
   
   Column 1 = Ticker
   Column 2 = YMD
   Column 3 = Open
   Column 4 = High
   Column 5 = Low
   Column 6 = Close
   Column 7 = Volume

6. Ensure “comma separated” is selected, skip first 1 lines, tick log errors, tick automatically add new symbols

7. Click Next

8. Save the settings so next time you can use the Asci importer rather than the Wizard

9. Click finish… and WAIT. It looks like it is not doing anything but just be patient and it will work. Takes a few minutes to import depending on your computer speed.

10. Create a Watchlist for the ‘GWA’ Tokens for Backtesting
    

Watch: Adrian has also prepared a useful video on his blog