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:

All results include an assetClass field so you know which category each symbol belongs to. Searches run in parallel — equity and commodity results return immediately while crypto/currency queries complete.

For commodities, use the canonical id (e.g. gold, crude_oil, copper) with calculateIndicator 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 calculateIndicator.

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.

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 uses one of two backends, configured in data/config/market-data.json:

{
  "backend": "typebb-sdk",
  "providers": {
    "equity": "yfinance",
    "crypto": "yfinance",
    "currency": "yfinance",
    "commodity": "yfinance"
  },
  "providerKeys": {},
  "apiServer": { "enabled": true, "port": 6901 }
}

The default typebb-sdk backend runs entirely in-process — no external sidecar or Docker container needed. Switch to openbb-api if you run an OpenBB API server separately.