I'm building a finance dashboard and need market data via API

Absolutely — for a finance dashboard, you’ll usually want one or more of these market-data API types:

Common market data needs

• Real-time quotes: latest price, bid/ask, volume
• Historical prices: OHLCV candles for charts/backtesting
• Fundamentals: market cap, P/E, revenue, earnings
• News/sentiment: headlines, analyst ratings, social sentiment
• Corporate actions: splits, dividends, symbol changes
• Reference data: exchange, currency, asset class, trading hours

Popular market data API providers

• Polygon.io — strong for US stocks/options/forex/crypto, good real-time/historical coverage
• Finnhub — broad coverage incl. fundamentals, news, earnings, some real-time
• Alpha Vantage — easy to start, good for historical/equities/FX, rate-limited
• IEX Cloud — equities-focused, developer-friendly
• Tiingo — clean historical and end-of-day data
• Twelve Data — stocks, FX, crypto, indicators
• Nasdaq Data Link (Quandl) — macro/alt datasets and some market data
• Twelve Data / Polygon / Finnhub are often good dashboard choices depending on latency needs

What to choose depends on:

1. Asset class: stocks, options, ETFs, crypto, FX, futures?
2. Latency: real-time, delayed, or end-of-day?
3. Region: US only or global?
4. Budget: free tier vs paid
5. Volume: how many symbols and requests/minute

Example API flow

Typical dashboard integration:

1. Fetch instrument list/watchlist
2. Pull latest quote for each symbol
3. Load historical candles for charting
4. Refresh periodically via polling or websockets
5. Cache results to reduce API costs/latency

Example response shape you might want

{
  "symbol": "AAPL",
  "price": 189.52,
  "change": 1.24,
  "changePercent": 0.66,
  "open": 188.1,
  "high": 190.2,
  "low": 187.9,
  "volume": 52100411,
  "timestamp": "2026-10-08T14:32:00Z"
}

If you want, I can help you with any of these next:

1. recommend the best API provider for your dashboard,
2. design the API schema for your frontend,
3. write example code in Python/JavaScript,
4. or compare pricing/limits across providers.