Market Data File Size Calculator
Ten years of daily candles is a file you could email. The same ten years in 1-minute bars is a few hundred megabytes, and in raw ticks it is tens of gigabytes. Pick an instrument, a timeframe and a range below to see what you would be asking for — before you start the download.
What the estimate is built from
Row counts come from how much of the week each asset class actually trades — crypto quotes around the clock, single-stock CFDs follow their exchange session of roughly 6.5 hours × 252 days, and forex, metals, indices, commodities, bonds and ETFs run 24 hours × 5 days. That figure is divided by the bar length, then multiplied by 50 bytes per CSV row. It is the same model the 265 instrument pages print, so the two can never disagree.
Every start date is exact, taken from the source's own per-timeframe metadata. They are not all the same for one instrument: gold's daily candles begin 1999-06-03 while its ticks begin 2003-05-05. Ask for a range that starts earlier than the timeframe exists and the calculator clamps it, and says so.
What it will not tell you
Tick volume is not estimated, on purpose. The number of quotes in a day depends on the instrument, the session and how the market behaved — an active forex pair can produce millions of them, a quiet cross a small fraction of that. No single constant covers it honestly, so this page does not print one. What it can tell you is the shape of the problem: ticks are the raw feed, and a multi-year tick range is a multi-gigabyte download. The file-size guide works through real examples, and tick data vs OHLC candles covers whether you need them at all.
Frequently asked questions
- How accurate are these estimates?
- They are deliberate approximations, rounded, at 50 bytes per CSV row. Row counts come from how much of the week each asset class actually trades — crypto around the clock, single-stock CFDs on their exchange session, everything else 24×5 — so they are close enough to size a disk and a download, not to the byte.
- Why can it not estimate tick data?
- Because the quote rate varies by instrument, by session and by how volatile the market was that day, and no honest single constant covers it. An active forex pair can produce millions of quotes in a day. The app shows the real size as it fetches; this page will not print a made-up number instead.
- Why does my start date move when I change timeframe?
- Each granularity has its own history start. EUR/USD daily candles reach back to 1973, but its quote-level archive begins in 2003 — so asking for 1-minute data from 1973 gives you the series from the date it actually exists, and the calculator clamps to that.
- Is JSON the same size as CSV?
- No — JSON repeats the field names on every row, so expect it to run substantially larger. The estimates here are for CSV.
Get the app and run the download — Windows, macOS, Linux →
Free to install; a licence from €9 activates retrieval. See the three tiers.