I’ve had a brief e-mail conversation with the customer support team over at TradeKing.  I can now confirm that they do not offer any API access for data downloads or trading instruction uploads.

image: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/kakaopor

I’ve got to say that TradeKing’s customer support team is right on the ball.  They were quick to respond, didn’t misunderstand my questions, and didn’t run me around in circles by telling me to read various web pages or anything like that.  It turns out they do not currently support any sort of programmatic / API access to their platform, though the person I conversed with said that they have talked about offering such a service.   Unfortunately, that offering is likely to be a year or more out.

I’ve suggested that they add this topic to their FAQ but I doubt it will make it there — how many companies list services they don’t provide on their FAQ?  “Q: Does ExxonMobil provide window cleaning services?  A: Not even remotely” Ha!

I’m somewhat disappointed because I had done a good bit of brokerage review reading over the weekend and it definitely seemed that TradeKing was highly recommended for their low costs, quality trading platform, fast execution, customer support, and community site.  Pretty much the whole package except for that API issue.