Every source carries a licence profile
Every market observation, corporate fact, filing claim, event and private document in Quantify Terminal is stored with the source it came from and a machine-readable licence profile for that source. The profile records what is permitted: display, non-display, derived use, caching, redistribution and AI retrieval. Those permissions are enforced by the read layer itself, at retrieval time: the licence profile travels with the value, so every caller that reads a field — the panels, the research engine, the exporters, the MCP server an agent talks to — is answered through the same check. The desk never depends on which vendor supplied a field, and no caller can read past what the licence allows.
Display versus non-display
Display use is a person looking at data on a screen: a quote panel, a chart, a filing viewer. Non-display use is data consumed by a process rather than a person: fed into a model, a screen, a backtest, a risk calculation or an agent. Exchanges and data providers license the two differently, and many licence display use but restrict non-display use to separately entitled users. Quantify Terminal records which of the two each source permits and applies it. A field licensed for display only can be shown, but it will not be fed into a model, a screen or an agent.
What each licence tier permits
The free desktop terminal ships with delayed market data, core research, charting and portfolio tools. Delayed data is licensed for display and for the research and portfolio work that runs on the desk. Real-time and low-latency feeds carry per-user entitlement and reporting obligations, and they are part of the paid plans that open with the next release.
Why some data is delayed
Real-time redistribution of exchange data requires per-user entitlement, reporting back to the exchange, and in most cases a fee per user per month. Delayed data does not. Keeping an early-access licence on delayed data keeps it licence-clean for everyone who installs it, without a registration step that the data does not justify. When you move to a paid plan, the entitlement is recorded against your account and the real-time feed is switched on for you, not for the software in general.
How entitlements are enforced
Enforcement is not a setting. It sits in the layer every read goes through, so the desktop, a research run, an export and an agent calling the terminal as a tool are all answered by the same rules, and the rules are the source's own.
- Each request is checked against the licence profile of every source it would touch.
- A computed figure inherits the rights of what it was computed from. A ratio, a trailing-twelve-month line, a beta, a news tone or a last-reported date records the sources it was built on, and the answer for it is the strictest of theirs — so a multiple computed from a quote licensed for display only cannot be exported or placed in a model prompt, and the refusal names the source you would have to licence.
- When a feed fails, Data Guardian fails over only to an alternate provider you are entitled to. It never borrows from one you are not.
- For private documents, embedding access is document access. Vector indexes carry the same permissions as the documents they index, so nothing surfaces through an AI answer that a user could not open directly.
- Every rights decision is recorded, allowed or refused, with the source, the use and the reason, in the terminal's own audit log.
What the system will not do
- Show you data you are not licensed to see.
- Feed display-only data into a model, screen, backtest or agent.
- Retrieve a source for an AI answer where the licence forbids AI retrieval.
- Cache or redistribute beyond what the licence permits.
Every source, and what its licence permits
The table below is generated from the licence profiles the software itself applies, not written by hand, so it cannot describe a policy the product is not keeping. Shown to you is display on the screen of the signed-in person whose subscription fetched it. Republished is reproduction somewhere anyone can read, which is a much narrower right. Sent to a model is placement in a language model's context, including through the MCP server — a value you may be shown is not thereby allowed into a prompt. Terms verified says whether a person has read that source's licence page; where it says no, the terminal applies the stricter reading until somebody has.
| Provider | What we read | Shown to you | Republished | Sent to a model | Used for training | Kept for | Terms verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACLED | Conflict event data | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| Alpha Vantage | REST API | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| BlackRock iShares | Fund holdings files (public web pages) | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| BSE Ltd | Corporate announcements (public exchange endpoint) | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| CME Group | Market data (any product) | no | no | no | no | session | no |
| CoinGecko | API | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| European Central Bank | ECB Data Portal (statistics) | yes | yes | yes | yes | unlimited | yes |
| Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis | FRED / ALFRED API | yes | yes | yes | no | unlimited | yes |
| Financial Modeling Prep | REST API (fund holdings, ESG, dividends) | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| FINRA | Bond market data and short-interest reports (public web services) | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| GDELT Project | DOC 2.0 / GKG | yes | yes | yes | no | unlimited | yes |
| Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System | Disaster alerts feed | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation | Global LEI Index (ISIN-to-LEI mapping) | yes | yes | yes | yes | unlimited | yes |
| GNews | Search API (headlines) | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no |
| Google News | RSS search feeds (headlines) | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no |
| ImportKey | US customs import records | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| MarketScreener | Company pages (shareholders and peers) | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| Nasdaq | Delayed quotes and derived data (nasdaq.com site API) | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no |
| National Stock Exchange of India | Corporate announcements (public exchange endpoint) | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| NewsAPI | REST API | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no |
| NewsData.io | REST API | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no |
| OpenSky Network | ADS-B | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no |
| Polygon.io | REST API | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| Publisher RSS feeds | Headlines | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| Quantify Terminal | Derived analytics | yes | no | yes | no | unlimited | yes |
| Quantify Terminal Data Fabric | A series read from the canonical store, carried without its sources | yes | no | no | no | session | no |
| Quantify Terminal models | Cells computed by a model from its inputs | yes | no | no | no | unlimited | no |
| Quantify Terminal relationship map | Ownership, subsidiary, index and peer edges | yes | no | no | no | unlimited | no |
| Quantify Terminal sector models | Sector cells summed across issuers | yes | no | no | no | unlimited | no |
| Quantify Terminal supply-chain map | Supplier and customer edges | yes | no | no | no | unlimited | no |
| Public posts (sentiment desk) | yes | no | no | no | 1 day | no | |
| State Street Global Advisors | SPDR fund holdings files (public web pages) | yes | no | no | no | 7 days | no |
| Supplied by the caller | Rows handed to a backtest or a signal study | yes | no | no | no | session | no |
| Taiwan Stock Exchange | Open data API and market information pages | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| The signed-in user | Notebook and private data | yes | no | yes | no | unlimited | yes |
| Twelve Data | Global quotes, time series, company profile and statements | yes | no | no | no | unlimited | no |
| U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission | EDGAR current filings feed | yes | yes | yes | yes | unlimited | yes |
| U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission | EDGAR APIs | yes | yes | yes | yes | unlimited | yes |
| U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission | EDGAR full and daily indexes | yes | yes | yes | yes | unlimited | yes |
| Uppsala Conflict Data Program | UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (API) | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| Wikimedia Foundation | Pageviews REST API and the Wikidata Action API | yes | yes | yes | yes | unlimited | yes |
| World Bank | Indicators API | yes | yes | yes | no | unlimited | yes |
| XBRL International | filings.xbrl.org (ESEF / UKSEF annual reports as Inline XBRL) | yes | no | no | no | unlimited | no |
| Yahoo Finance (via the terminal price path) | Daily bars backfilled for a backtest | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
| Yahoo Finance (via yfinance) | Quotes, fundamentals, estimates, news | yes | no | no | no | 30 days | no |
45 sources, generated from the licence profiles the terminal enforces, on 6 October 2026.
Licensing conversations
If you are evaluating for a firm, bringing your own data licences, or need a specific feed entitled, write to sales@mail.quantifyterminal.com. For how the rest of the system handles security, data and exports, see Trust.