#candlestick#order book#MCP+2 more
If you spend any time around trading APIs — or any crypto MCP, including ours — you’ll keep running into the same three words: orderbook, ticker, candle. They are the three fundamental shapes of market data. Every chart you’ve ever seen, every indicator, every alert, every backtest — all of it is built on one or more of these.
This article is an opinionated primer. By the end you’ll know exactly what each data type is, when to use which, how much it costs, and why professional traders quietly rely on tickers way more than you’d expect.
A ticker is a tiny summary of what’s happening in a market right now. An orderbook is the full list of buyers and sellers currently queued up. A candle is a compressed record of what happened over a fixed time window. They answer three different questions — “how are we?”, “who wants to trade?”, “what has been happening?” — and a well-designed analysis uses all three, in proportion.
A ticker is a snapshot. For a given market (say, BTC/USDT on Binance), a ticker tells you:
It’s a single object, a few hundred bytes, updated as fast as the exchange can serve it. It’s the cheapest piece of market data you can ask for.
Professionals use tickers for what we call “the scan” — you want to look at hundreds or thousands of pairs and spot the ones that deserve a closer look. Which pairs had the biggest move? Which pairs have abnormal volume today? Which pairs have a wider-than-normal spread?
You can do all of that with tickers alone, without ever touching an orderbook or a candle. That’s why ticker-based workflows are so quota-friendly on the CryptoBot MCP — a ticker sweep of the top 200 pairs is effectively free.
A practical rule of thumb: if the question you’re asking could be printed on the first row of a Bloomberg terminal, a ticker has the answer. Only when you need more should you escalate.
Examples of good ticker-only workflows: