Data
Data sources
| Source | What we use it for | Freshness |
|---|---|---|
| Yahoo Finance | Quotes, intraday and daily price history, index futures (ES, NQ, YM, RTY), headlines | Delayed (typically 15 min for U.S. stocks); quotes refreshed every minute while the market is open |
| U.S. SEC EDGAR | Company financials from 10-Q and 10-K filings, point in time | Checked nightly for new filings |
| FRED (St. Louis Fed) | Economic calendar and macro series (CPI, jobs, GDP, rates) | Every 6 hours |
| Finnhub / Polygon | Market caps, profiles, earnings calendar (when configured) | Every 6 hours |
| Alpaca | Paper trading account and IEX market data (when configured) | Live for the paper account |
| OpenAI / xAI | Optional AI coach and market brief text. Never used for prices or signals. | On request |
Local first
ZandD's server keeps a copy of everything it downloads in its own database. Pages answer from that copy at once and refresh it in the background on a market-hours schedule, so ZD Terminal keeps working when a provider is slow or the internet is down. Screens say when they show a local copy.
How the numbers are made
- Daily plans use the last completed daily bar: a trend bias from moving averages and RSI, floor-trader pivots, a 1-ATR stop and a 2R target. Each plan's record replays the same rule on five years of that market.
- Futures since the close compare each contract with its own price at the last 4:00 pm ET stock close, and imply an ETF open from that move.
- Trade ideas come from eight rule-based setups decided on the daily close, with fills simulated on the following sessions (stop first, costs included).
- Forecasts are trained and tested walk-forward, with purging, on data the model has not seen. Their real accuracy is shown next to them.
Known limits
- Prices are delayed and unofficial; providers can be wrong, change or rate-limit their services.
- The research universe is today's large caps, so long-history statistics carry survivorship bias.
- Futures history is the continuous front-month contract without back-adjusting quarterly rolls.
- Exchange holidays are not modelled in session clocks.
- Statistics cover a few years that were mostly a rising market; short setups are lightly tested in bear markets.
Use of the data
Data in ZD Terminal is for ZandD's internal research. It remains the property of its providers and may not be redistributed. Nothing here is investment advice: see the Terms of Use.