History Endpoints Guide

1. Overview

The History endpoints provide access to intraday historical OHLCV data for any supported symbol. These endpoints are designed for retrieving second, minute, or hour granularity data — one day per request for second bars, or one month per request for minute and hour bars. For daily or higher timeframes, use the /series endpoints which already return all available data points.

Because historical data retrieval is resource-intensive, these endpoints have concurrency limits and queuing behavior that differ from standard series endpoints. This guide explains how they work and when to use them.

insight download_history --symbol "NASDAQ:AAPL" --bar_type minute --bar_interval 5 \
  --from 2024-01 --to 2024-06 --output_dir ./history --concurrency 5

2. Endpoints

Endpoint

GET https://api.insightsentry.com/v3/symbols/{code}/history

Query Parameters

3. Supported Bar Types

History endpoints support the following bar types:

4. Concurrency

History endpoints are available on Ultra plans and above. Each user can run history requests up to their plan's concurrency limit. This limit applies across all history requests regardless of which symbol or timeframe is being queried.

Queuing Behavior

If you send a request while at your concurrency limit, the request is placed in a pending state for up to 40 seconds while it waits for a slot to free up. If a slot becomes available within that window, the request proceeds normally. If no slot opens in time, the request is rejected with a 429 Too Many Requests response.

Additionally, if the handling instance is temporarily at capacity, the request may be rejected with a 503 Service Unavailable response. Since requests are distributed across multiple servers, retrying may route to a different instance with available capacity.

Response Codes

5. Caching

Responses from history endpoints are served through a CDN with caching that varies based on how recent the data is:

• Older periods — Historical data that is unlikely to change (e.g., completed months) is cached for a longer duration.
• Current period — Data for the current or most recent period is cached for less than a day to balance freshness with performance.

6. When to Use

Use History Endpoints When

• You need second, minute, or hour data from a specific past date or month
• You are building a dataset that spans multiple months of intraday data
• The standard /series endpoint does not return enough data points for your needs

Use Series Endpoints Instead When

• You need recent or real-time data
• You are working with day, week, or month bar types — all available data points are returned by /series
• You need low-latency responses without queuing

7. Examples

Minute Data for a Specific Month

curl --get 'https://api.insightsentry.com/v3/symbols/NASDAQ%3AAAPL/history' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --data-urlencode 'bar_type=minute' \
  --data-urlencode 'bar_interval=1' \
  --data-urlencode 'start_date=2024-06'

Second Data for a Specific Day

curl --get 'https://api.insightsentry.com/v3/symbols/NASDAQ%3AAAPL/history' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --data-urlencode 'bar_type=second' \
  --data-urlencode 'bar_interval=1' \
  --data-urlencode 'start_date=2024-06-14'

Hourly Data for a Specific Month

curl --get 'https://api.insightsentry.com/v3/symbols/CME_MINI%3ANQ1%21/history' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
  --data-urlencode 'bar_type=hour' \
  --data-urlencode 'bar_interval=1' \
  --data-urlencode 'start_date=2024-03'

For futures backfills across individual contracts, see the Historical Data for Futures guide. It covers using the contracts endpoint to derive product-specific contract codes and settlement-month ranges.

Multi-Month Fetching

import time
from urllib.parse import quote

import requests

API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY"
BASE_URL = "https://api.insightsentry.com"
SYMBOL = "NASDAQ:AAPL"
MONTHS = [
    "2024-01",
    "2024-02",
    "2024-03",
    "2024-04",
    "2024-05",
    "2024-06",
    "2024-07",
    "2024-08",
]
REQUEST_TIMEOUT_SECONDS = 120
MAX_RETRIES = 5


def build_session():
    session = requests.Session()
    session.headers.update({
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}",
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
    })
    return session


def fetch_history_month(session, symbol, month):
    encoded_symbol = quote(symbol, safe="")
    url = f"{BASE_URL}/v3/symbols/{encoded_symbol}/history"
    params = {
        "bar_type": "minute",
        "bar_interval": "1",
        "start_date": month,
    }

    for attempt in range(1, MAX_RETRIES + 1):
        response = session.get(url, params=params, timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT_SECONDS)

        if response.status_code == 429 or response.status_code >= 500:
            time.sleep(attempt * 0.5)
            continue

        response.raise_for_status()
        data = response.json()
        message = data.get("message") or data.get("error")
        if message:
            print(f"{month}: {message}")
            return None

        return data

    raise RuntimeError(f"{month}: exhausted retries")


session = build_session()
for month in MONTHS:
    data = fetch_history_month(session, SYMBOL, month)
    if data is None:
        continue

    print(f"{month}: {len(data.get('series', []))} bars")