Symbol Search

Status: stable. The Analysis section covers OpenAlice's read-only market research tools — symbol discovery, equity fundamentals, technical analysis, and news. They have no side effects, no broker contact, and are safe to exercise without an account configured. In contrast to the Trading stack, these surfaces are considered ready for daily use.

OpenAlice has two different search tools for two different purposes:

• marketSearchForResearch — Search for symbols to use with market data tools (profiles, financials, indicators). Works across all asset classes.
• searchContracts — Search your connected broker accounts for tradeable contracts. Used before placing orders.

marketSearchForResearch

Unified cross-asset search for market data research. Covers four asset classes:

Equity search no longer stops at the local index. It fans out concurrently across [primary yfinance, ...extraVendors] — yfinance (the global default: US, plus CN .SS/.SZ, HK .HK, TW .TW/.TWO, JP .T, KR .KS, EU…) plus any regional vendors the user has opted into (eastmoney for CN A-shares, twse for Taiwan). See Vendors below.

All results include an assetClass field so you know which category each symbol belongs to, and a sourceId naming the vendor that produced the hit. Searches run in parallel — the local SEC index returns instantly while crypto, currency, and online equity vendor hits complete after. Cross-vendor results are kept redundant on purpose: 600519.SS from yfinance and 1.600519 from eastmoney are distinct candidates in different symbol namespaces, not duplicates to be merged.

For commodities, use the canonical id (e.g. gold, crude_oil, copper) with calculateQuant and other tools. Provider-specific tickers like GC=F or GCUSD are resolved automatically behind the scenes.

You: Search for anything related to "nvidia"

Alice: Found 3 results:
  • NVDA (equity) — NVIDIA Corp
  • NVDA240621C00130000 (equity) — options chain
  ...

Use this tool to find the correct symbol before calling data tools like equityGetProfile, equityGetFinancials, or calculateQuant.

Vendors — self-describing & agent-toggleable

Equity search is federated across vendors, and the vendor list is itself a runtime surface. Each vendor owns its own description: the prose (what it covers, how to address its symbols) lives on the provider's vendorMeta, so adding a vendor carries its own usage note — there's no outer catalog to forget to update.

listMarketVendors joins that self-description to current on/off state and returns, per vendor: id, name, enabled, alwaysOn, keyless, coverage, howToUse, and website. setMarketVendor(vendor, enabled) flips the vendor in marketData.extraVendors and persists it — live on the next search, no restart. yfinance is the always-on primary equity vendor and cannot be toggled off.

The discoverability loop

The picker exists so an agent can self-serve when a query comes up empty — it never depends on the user remembering to open a settings page:

You: Find 茅台 (Kweichow Moutai)

Alice: [marketSearchForResearch("茅台") → no equity hits]
       [listMarketVendors() → eastmoney is off, covers CN A-shares by Chinese name]
       [setMarketVendor("eastmoney", true)]
       [marketSearchForResearch("茅台") → 1.600519 (eastmoney) · Kweichow Moutai]

Two AI tools back this loop — listMarketVendors and setMarketVendor — alongside the CLI alice market vendors (list) and alice market vendor-set (toggle).

Vendor catalog

providers vs extraVendors. providers sets the per-asset default vendor used for bar routing; extraVendors is the opt-in list of incremental equity vendors federated into search alongside the default. Enabling a regional vendor is purely additive — it surfaces extra candidates in their own namespace, it never replaces yfinance.

searchContracts

Broker-level search that queries your connected trading accounts for contracts you can actually trade. Returns aliceId values needed for placing orders.

You: Search for AAPL contracts I can trade

Alice: Found on alpaca-paper:
  • alpaca-paper|AAPL — Apple Inc (US equity)

The aliceId format is accountId|nativeKey — this is what you pass to placeOrder, getQuote, and other trading tools.

searchBars — federated K-line sources

For OHLCV K-lines (charting and technical analysis) there's a third search, searchBars, backed by a federated bar layer. The same symbol often has several K-line sources — a data vendor, and any connected broker whose bars match exactly what you'd trade — and searchBars returns them all as barId candidates:

You: Where can I get AAPL daily bars?

Alice: [calls searchBars(query="AAPL")]
  • yfinance|AAPL      vendor · delayed
  • alpaca-paper|AAPL  broker · iex

Each candidate carries a barId ("{source}|{symbol}"), a source (vendor / uta), an assetClass, and a barCapability freshness tier (realtime / iex / delayed / …). The freshness tier is also embedded inline in the candidate label — AAPL · Apple Inc (yfinance) · delayed, AAPL (alpaca-paper) · iex — so an agent can't miss that a vendor source is EOD-delayed even when it falls back to one. Candidates are sorted broker-fresh-first (realtime > iex > subscription > delayed > free), but the list stays fully redundant — the order is only the suggested default pick. The sources are not merged — picking one is a deliberate choice of provenance and freshness. You feed the chosen barId to the Quant Calculator's bars(...), and in the Web UI you pick the provider right on the chart (it threads through as a ?source= param).

Keyless data accounts — optional crypto K-lines with no key

OpenAlice can create three keyless, read-only data UTAs — binance-readonly, okx-readonly, and bybit-readonly. They are disabled by default. In Readonly or Pro mode, enable the desired exchanges under Trading → Public crypto data sources. Enabled sources need no API key, expose public K-lines in searchBars (binance-readonly|BTC/USDT, …), refuse orders, and stay out of portfolio-account surfaces. See Keyless Data Accounts.

Three searches, three jobs. marketSearchForResearch finds vendor symbols for fundamental research; searchContracts finds tradeable contracts on your broker accounts; searchBars finds K-line sources (vendor or broker) for charting and quant.

Symbol Index

The equity symbol index is a local cache of ~13,000 US and Canadian stock symbols sourced from SEC and TMX listings. It's loaded once on startup and supports instant regex matching — no network calls needed for equity symbol lookups.

Data Backend Configuration

Market data runs entirely in-process through the SDK — there's no external sidecar or Docker container to stand up. (The old openbb-api backend was removed.) Low-frequency data resolves through the hosted Data Hub first, falling back to your own provider keys, so a fresh install needs zero data-provider accounts. Configuration lives in ~/.openalice/data/config/market-data.json:

{
  "hub": { "enabled": true, "baseUrl": "https://traderhub.openalice.ai" },
  "providers": {
    "equity": "yfinance",
    "crypto": "yfinance",
    "currency": "yfinance",
    "commodity": "yfinance"
  },
  "extraVendors": [],
  "providerKeys": {}
}

See the Data Hub page for the full resolution model and the nine reference boards it serves.

Next Steps

• Equity Research — Use research symbols for fundamentals and profiles.
• Technical Analysis — Use searchBars sources for quant scripts.
• Trading Setup — Connect accounts that provide tradeable contracts.
• Orders & Execution — Place orders with the correct aliceId.