Subscribe to Market Data Over the Tradovate API

Want live bids, offers, and trades streaming into your own code instead of the Trader app? Tradovate hands them over through a WebSocket, but not the one most people try first. Get the endpoint wrong and every subscription comes back as a cryptic Not found: md/subscribeQuote. Here's the exact path from access token to a running quote stream, plus the two mistakes that trip up almost everyone.

Why a Separate Market Data Socket?

Tradovate splits its real-time traffic across two WebSockets. One carries your account and order events; the other carries market data, quotes, DOM depth, charts, and histograms. They speak the same frame protocol, but they live on different hosts. Market data endpoints like md/subscribeQuote only exist on the market data socket, so if you send that request to the account socket you get a "not found" error even though your token is perfectly valid.

Before You Start

• API access enabled, the API Access add-on has to be turned on for your login.
• An access token, you'll pull one in Step 1.
• A live market-data entitlement, real-time API data requires a CME market-data subscription (you become a registered sub-vendor). The fee runs a few hundred dollars a month, so check Tradovate's current rate before you commit. Without it, you'll still connect, you just get a Symbol is inaccessible reply.

Subscribe to Tradovate Market Data: Step-by-Step

For reference, the account socket lives at wss://demo.tradovateapi.com/v1/websocket and wss://live.tradovateapi.com/v1/websocket, different hostnames entirely.

authorize
1

YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN

That's authorize, then 1, then an empty query line, then the token, each on its own line.

md/subscribeQuote
2

{"symbol":"ESU6"}

{"e":"md","d":{"quotes":[{"contractId":123456,"entries":{"Bid":{"price":5602.25,"size":18},"Offer":{"price":5602.50,"size":24},"Trade":{"price":5602.25,"size":3}}}]}}

Common Gotchas

• "Not found: md/subscribeQuote", you're on the account socket. Reconnect to the md-demo / md host from Step 2.
• "Symbol is inaccessible", your login lacks a real-time data agreement for that product, or the symbol isn't a valid front-month contract.
• Feed goes silent after a few seconds, you stopped sending [] heartbeats. Put them on a 2.5-second timer that runs for the life of the socket.

Skip the Plumbing With PickMyTrade

Standing up a market data socket, token refresh, heartbeats, reconnect logic, the CME data license, is real work before you've placed a single order. If your goal is just to automate entries and exits from your strategy, PickMyTrade wires your TradingView alerts straight to Tradovate. No WebSocket to babysit.