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Getting Started

The cTrader Open API is a service you can use to develop custom applications connected to the cTrader backend. This documentation provides everything you need to know including SDK information, structured tutorials, code snippets, and more.

What Is Open API?

The cTrader Open API is a service that allows anyone with a cTID to create an application sending and receiving information to and from the cTrader backend. You can use this API to develop trading-oriented apps or services, or integrate the cTrader backend with any existing solutions you may have.

Using this API involves sending and receiving Google Protocol Buffers. These messages are language-neutral, meaning that you can use any programming language you want to interact with the API.

Open API is part of the cTrader platform which is available for all cTrader-affiliated brokers.

Use Cases

Here are just some of the possible applications you may create when interacting with the cTrader Open API.

  • A custom trading application that funnels new users to create new accounts with a certain broker.
  • A Telegram bot that automatically informs your followers of any new traders you may have placed.
  • An app for wearables that displays the current P&L of the five most recent positions opened by the user.
  • A mobile app that gives a market overview by using a generative AI service.

As you can see, the cTrader Open API is perfect for professional traders who want to go social and closely interact with their followers.

Essential Functionality

Here is a non-exhaustive list of what the cTrader Open API allows your code to do.

  • Access real-time market data.
  • Perform all possible types of trading operations permitted in the 'main' cTrader applications.
  • Retrieve and process account information including deals, orders, and positions.

As shown in our Terms of Use, the API can be accessed by anyone with a cTID, and, by default, it is supported by all trading accounts of any cTrader-affiliated brokers.

Rate Limiting

Note that there exist some limits on how many times you can perform certain requests to the cTrader backend.

  • You can perform a maximum of 50 requests per second per connection for any non-historical data requests.
  • You can perform a maximum of 5 requests per second per connection for any historical data requests.

Demo and Live Trading

The cTrader Open API can be used to trade on behalf of both Demo and Live accounts.

We recommend using Demo accounts for development and testing, and then switching to Live after making sure that your integration with the cTrader Open API works correctly.

However, there are no hard restrictions, and you may freely choose to start development and testing under a Live account.

SDKs

While you can use any language to implement the cTrader Open API, we highly recommend using a language that has official SDK support from Spotware. To date, these languages are as follows.

Every official SDK listed above contains 'helper' methods and classes that are designed to make the implementation of the cTrader Open API as smooth as possible.

Code Snippets

All code snippets in this documentation only provide code snippets in the languages for which there exist official Spotware SDKs. Barring some exceptions, these code snippets use the classes and methods from the related SDKs, meaning that you can reuse these code snippets freely without having to spend time on reviewing their definitions.

Last update: May 18, 2023