No. Non-professional vs professional is not the issue. The question is - are you an
algorithmic trader?
I just pulled up the emails, and it's much worse than I remembered!
In October 2017, I received the below email from Ally:
Dear Valued Client,
Thank you for being an Ally Invest API user. Part of our responsibility of providing an API with Real-time data, is reviewing how the market data is being used. To help us do that we ask that you please take a moment to complete the attached questionnaire. Once complete, you can email the questionnaire to apiquestionnaire@invest.ally.com. If you have more than one application please complete a separate questionnaire for each application.
Please return the completed questionnaire by 10/16/2017, to avoid any disruption to your application. If we do not receive your completed questionnaire by 10/16/2017, then your API access will be restricted.
We appreciate your attention to this request,
The Ally Invest API Team.
Attached is the questionnaire. I filled it out, and obviously, I checked all of the boxes at the bottom.
They replied:
Thank you for your questionnaire! Unfortunately, based on your questionnaire, we are not able to allow you API access. This is due to your use of data in a non-displayed fashion:
Non-Display use of real-time market data is defined by the Exchanges as accessing, processing, or consuming market data for a purpose other than in support of the data recipient’s display. The Exchanges have recently begun to enforce this rule in terms of monthly fees to the user and fines to data vendors that offer data and are not monitoring how that data is consumed.
As a data vendor, Ally Invest must respect and enforce the rules provided by the Exchanges. After reviewing your responses to the questionnaire, it appears you are using market data in a non-displayed manner. Consequently, we may no longer be able to provide real-time market data to your application, which means we might need to terminate your API access. We are working on a solution that would provide 15-minute delayed data via the API, which the Exchanges would not charge for. Until that time, you will need to work with our API Business Development team to see what options are available to you. That team will reach out to you shortly. Please be responsive to discussing your situation with them so that we can attempt to prevent turning off your access.
The email then went on to describe all the monthly fees, which are thousands of dollars per exchange! I attached that pricing info as well in the zip file.
