CUCKOOTRADE
Guides

Testing trading software against data you control

Every guide here is a working answer to a problem that market data creates: a key you cannot put in CI, a crash you cannot schedule, a socket that will not drop when you need it to. All examples run verbatim against the live API, with no key and no signup.

Point your client somewhere else

AlpacaHow to mock the Alpaca API for local development and tests One url_override line puts alpaca-py on a keyless mock server. What matches, what deliberately does not, and how to write fixtures that never expire. PolygonHow to mock the Polygon.io API for development and tests The real aggregates envelope, cursor pagination via next_url, and request_id values stable enough to assert on. Alpha VantageHow to mock the Alpha Vantage API, including intraday Numbered string keys, newest-first maps, errors that arrive as HTTP 200 — and intraday history that is premium upstream and free here.

Break things on purpose

ScenariosHow to test a trading bot against a market crash, halt, or gap Force a 25% drawdown, a mid-session halt, a 12% overnight gap, or a feed that freezes while every liveness check reports green. FaultsHow to test retry logic and API failures deterministically 503s, hangs, half-written bodies, and an endpoint that fails exactly twice before it works. Reproducible, so it belongs in CI. StreamingHow to test a streaming market data client when markets are closed A tick stream that is alive at 3am on a Sunday, plus dropped sockets, truncated frames, and silent connections on cue.

Put it in the pipeline

CI/CDHow to run market data tests in CI without API keys Copy-paste GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and docker-compose setups. No secrets, no rate limits, no red build on a Sunday, and assertions that hold next year.

Elsewhere

The documentation is the parameter-by-parameter reference. The playground charts any scenario ticker without writing code. Swagger and openapi.json cover the machine surface, and llms.txt is the whole API in a single fetch for coding agents.

All data is synthetic. Every response is generated and marked with X-Cuckoo-Synthetic: true. CuckooTrade exists to exercise code paths — development, CI, demos, teaching. It is not market data, must never inform a real trade, and is not a backtesting tool.