Introducing

OTC Stocks Have Arrived

Jul 14, 2022

We've just rolled out OTC data to every individual stocks plan on the Polygon platform.  No additional subscription is needed, just query any OTC ticker from our REST or WebSocket APIs and get data for all US OTC venues.

Background on OTC Market

Trading in OTC securities offers a comparatively small but important market compared to traditional exchange traded stocks.  OTC traders can gain exposure to major international firms such as TenCent, Nintendo, and Danon through American Depository Receipts (ADRs).  Exchange traded securities, through bankruptcy and other reasons, sometimes find themselves delisted and trading on the OTC market. Risk tolerant traders test their mettle in the volatile OTC penny stocks.

Traditionally, market and reference data for OTC securities has been less accessible and less transparent than the well regulated exchange market.  Now, Polygon is making OTC data available to stocks users for no additional fees!

New API Features

Polygon’s APIs have expanded to include real time trade data for the US OTC equities market.  Polygon sources this data from a FINRA feed available thanks to trade reporting obligations.  Polygon’s data captures the entire US OTC equities market including trades from common “exchanges” – technically they are Alternative Trading Systems (ATSs) – such as OTC Markets and Global OTC.

EndpointOTC Supported
AggregatesYes
TradesYes
Reference - TickersYes
Reference - OtherNo
QuotesNo

REST API Endpoint Changes

OTC data is available across several API endpoints.  Polygon designed the REST API updates for OTC stocks to be opt-in so as not to break existing functionality.

The following endpoints have new parameters introduced.

Endpoint NamePathChange
Grouped Daily/v2/aggs/grouped/locale/us/market/stocks/{date}Added include_otc optional parameter. Defaults to false.
Snapshot All Tickers/v2/snapshot/locale/us/markets/stocks/tickersAdded include_otc optional parameter. Defaults to false.
Tickers/v3/reference/tickersAdded market parameter enum otc

WebSocket Changes

Subscribing to all stocks trades will now return OTC tickers and trades in addition to the previous, exchange traded security data.

Important! If your workflow subscribes to T.* you will see additional data for OTC securities.

{"action":"subscribe", "params":"T.*"}

// Trades for both exchange tickers like AAPL, TSLA, etc *and* OTC tickers such as DANOY, TCEHY are returned

Subscribing to individual tickers will continue to work as before.  OTC tickers will now work alongside exchange traded tickers.  

{"action":"subscribe", "params":"T.NTDOY"}

// Behavior when subscribing to a single ticker has not changed.  OTC tickers now supported.

OTC trades and aggregates are now fully released.  Everything you need to get started using OTC data can be found in our stocks documentation.  

If you are interested in OTC data for commercial or professional purposes, please reach out to sales@polygon.io to get set up.

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