Data-tier gating

Also seen as: data entitlement, required data product, plan-gated data

Why is market data gated by level at all?

Because market data is licensed from data providers, and depth is the expensive part of it. Broad recent coverage costs far less to supply than decades of deep history across many exchanges, so access is tiered rather than uniform. Gating is how that difference reaches the product, and it is the reason two accounts running byte-identical strategies can be offered different earliest start years.

What does data-tier gating control today?

The rule is expressed as an earliest simulation start year. The picker itself reaches back to 1792, and the setting defaults to 2000 — see simulation start year, which owns that field. A plan-derived floor later than the year you pick would win where one applies, but no such floor is resolved today.

The per-instrument side of the rule lives in the data rather than in a check you will hit: each instrument records the data level it needs, but Fincanva does not resolve a per-user data level across every surface today. This page therefore describes the concept and the limit that is genuinely enforced, not a full entitlement matrix.

Defaults in Fincanva

• The catalogue records a required data level per instrument. It is a property of the data, not a badge on screen.
• 2000 is the setting's default, not a hard limit: the starting-year picker reaches back to 1792.
• No plan-derived earliest-year floor is applied today — per-user tier resolution is not built, so every account reaches the same history.
• A shorter reachable window changes results: the same rules measured over a shorter period produce different metrics — see coverage window.

Worked example

The effect a floor has, where one applies, is worth understanding even though none is enforced today. Take a strategy set to start in 2000 against an earliest-year floor of 2010: the run would start in 2010, and a decade of market history — including the 2008 decline — would sit outside it entirely. Every metric is computed only over the years a run actually covers, so the same rules would produce a different CAGR and max drawdown than a run reaching back to 2000. Today no account is held to such a floor.

Nothing about the strategy changed between the two cases. Only the data it could reach did — which is why two results that look comparable are not, unless they cover the same window.