What Kinds of Datasets Are Available on Nasdaq Data Link?

Updated

Nasdaq Data Link is a data marketplace that organizes its catalog into three broad groups: financial market data, economic data, and alternative data. The right category for you depends on what you are trying to measure — a security's price history, a country's macro trajectory, or a non-traditional signal such as web traffic or sentiment. The platform's own description frames it as "the source for financial, economic, and alternative datasets, serving investment professionals," so those three labels are the intended way to navigate the catalog.

Financial data

This is the core of the platform and covers market and securities-related information. Typical datasets in this group include:

  • Equities — prices, volumes, corporate actions, and fundamentals.
  • Fixed income and rates — bond pricing, yield curves, and interest rate series.
  • Funds and ETFs — holdings, flows, and performance.
  • Derivatives and volatility — options and futures-related series.

Best for: backtesting trading strategies, building valuation or risk models, screening securities, and benchmarking portfolio performance against market history.

Economic data

Macroeconomic indicators, usually organized by country or region. Common content includes GDP, inflation, employment, interest rates, trade balances, and central bank series.

Best for: top-down macro research, country comparison, scenario analysis, and feeding macro factors into multi-asset or allocation models.

Alternative data

Non-traditional datasets that sit outside standard market and government statistics. Examples of the kinds of signals found here include web traffic, app usage, transaction or card-spend panels, sentiment, and satellite or geolocation observations.

Best for: generating differentiated signals that are not yet fully reflected in prices, nowcasting a company's revenue ahead of earnings, and supplementing fundamental research where conventional data is too slow or too coarse.

Choosing by use case

If your goal is… Start with…
Price a security or backtest a strategy Financial data
Understand a country's or region's trajectory Economic data
Find an edge not visible in standard datasets Alternative data
Combine macro context with security-level signals Economic + financial
Test a novel, faster-moving signal Alternative data

Practical notes

  • The catalog is large and spans many providers, so coverage, update frequency, and history length vary by dataset — check the individual dataset page rather than assuming uniformity.
  • The site is a JavaScript application; if you land on a blank page, enable JavaScript in your browser to load the catalog.
  • Access terms differ per dataset. The available page information does not specify pricing or login requirements, so confirm the specific dataset's terms before planning around it.