Building a cleaner symbol catalog for market data APIs
Market data integrations usually become messy for one simple reason: symbols are not always treated as product-level objects.
A stock symbol, a forex pair, a crypto pair, and a commodity contract may all look similar in a UI, but they often behave differently in an API integration. They may come from different data pipelines, support different endpoints, return different fields, or require different handling across REST and WebSocket connections.
We recently added a public symbol catalog to SiftingIO to make this layer more transparent.
The catalog covers supported symbols across US stocks, forex, crypto, and commodities. Each indexed symbol page is designed to show how that symbol can be used inside SiftingIO’s market data APIs, including REST examples, WebSocket usage, available fields, and related symbols.
The goal is not to publish a large static list.
The goal is to make each supported symbol easier to understand as an API object.
For example, a symbol page should help answer practical integration questions such as:
- Which asset class does this symbol belong to?
- What symbol key should be used in API requests?
- Can it be used with REST endpoints?
- Can it be used with WebSocket streams?
- What fields are returned for this symbol?
- Which related symbols may be useful in the same workflow?
This becomes important when building trading platforms, market dashboards, portfolio tools, financial apps, internal analytics systems, or backtesting workflows. The symbol format should not be something developers need to reverse-engineer from scattered examples.
We also kept the SEO footprint intentionally curated. Not every available symbol needs an indexed page. Thin, duplicated, long-tail pages are not useful for developers and they are not useful for search engines. For the first version, we are indexing a focused set of high-demand symbols and keeping the rest accessible through search.
You can explore the catalog here:
We will continue improving the catalog with better metadata, richer examples, and more asset-class-specific context over time.
