What You Need

The short version

Required: AmiBroker for Windows, and daily end-of-day data for twenty to fifty liquid instruments. AmiQuote, which ships with the installer, downloads free end-of-day data.

Not required: the Professional edition, a real-time feed, a paid data subscription, or any money at risk.

The course can be completed end to end without paying for market data. Ten parts cover real-time markets, and every one gives a complete alternative path.

Required: AmiBroker

AmiBroker is a Windows application. The official download page lists a free trial/demo, a universal installer covering both editions, and the add-on programs AmiQuote and AFL Code Wizard, which are bundled so they do not need to be downloaded separately.

This course is validated against AmiBroker 7.00.1, released 22 December 2025. Where behaviour depends on a version, the course says which version and cites the page that documents it.

The free trial version available on the download page is 6.93.0 (17 August 2024), which is older than the release the course is validated against. Everything in Levels 1 to 4 works on it. If you buy a licence, install the full licensed version from the Member’s Area rather than the trial installer — the download page says so explicitly.

✦Tip

On a Mac or Linux machine, AmiBroker runs under a Windows compatibility layer or a virtual machine. Neither is covered by this course and neither is supported by AmiBroker. If that is your only option, budget time for it before assuming a formula is broken.

Standard or Professional?

Both editions run every AFL feature this course teaches at Levels 1 to 4. Two documented differences matter.

Real-time data requires the Professional edition. The data-sources table in the User’s Guide records which sources need Professional, and the GetRTData() reference states that calling it on the Standard edition returns Null values for all fields. This is the difference that shapes Parts 17 to 26.

Threading. The User’s Guide’s multithreading page documents the Standard edition as running two threads per Analysis window against the Professional edition’s thirty-two. That affects how long a large optimisation takes, not what it produces.

✱AmiBroker Professional required

Start on Standard. Nothing in Levels 1 to 4 — which is Parts 1 to 16 and 27 to 36, the large majority of the course — needs Professional.

Buy Professional when you have a specific reason: you have decided to work with a live feed, or your optimisations have become slow enough to matter. Buying it first, in case, is buying a feature you have not yet found a use for.

Required: data

A daily end-of-day database with several years of history for twenty to fifty liquid instruments plus a benchmark index. That is enough for everything up to and including the capstone.

Free end-of-day data

AmiQuote is bundled with the AmiBroker installer and downloads free end-of-day quotes from several internet sources. The current version on the official download page is 4.40, released 9 July 2026, as a universal 32/64-bit installer; the 64-bit build requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2022 runtime, which the download page notes may need installing separately.

Part 3 covers importing data properly, and Part 18’s free sources appendix covers what free data is and is not good for.

⌀Data quality warning

Free end-of-day data is adequate for learning and it has real defects: missing bars, bad prints, inconsistent corporate-action adjustment, and providers that change or disappear.

Those defects are not a footnote to this course — Part 2 is built around them, and several later parts show what a data problem does to a result. Learning to find them on free data is better preparation than being handed clean data.

What “liquid instruments” means here

Twenty to fifty symbols is plenty. More is slower without teaching you anything extra. What matters is that they are:

• Actually traded — a meaningful daily turnover, so a position could exist.
• Split- and dividend-adjusted — unadjusted data manufactures breakouts and volume spikes on corporate-action bars, and several exercises specifically look for those events.
• Accompanied by a benchmark index in the same database, sharing the same trading calendar. The market dashboard, the regime filters and the relative-strength work all need one.

!Important

Your universe is almost certainly today’s list, and that matters. A watch list built from current index membership excludes everything that was delisted, merged or taken over — which is exactly the population whose returns were worst.

This is survivorship bias, Part 30 covers it properly, and the capstone asks you about it directly. It usually cannot be fixed with retail data. It can always be stated.

Optional: a real-time feed

The three data access levels this course is built around

1. Level A — no subscriptionFree end-of-day data, plus historical intraday data if you have any, plus Bar Replay. Every part of this course is completable here, including the capstone.
2. Level B — a broker feedReal-time data from a broker you already have an account with. Adds live charts and live scanning to Parts 17–26.
3. Level C — a professional vendor feedA dedicated market-data subscription. Adds depth, breadth of coverage and history that brokers usually do not supply.

Every real-time lesson gives a Level A path. The course is completable at Level A.

Parts 17 to 26 cover real-time markets in depth: the data architecture, providers, intraday databases, sessions and time zones, live charts, quotes, real-time AFL, live scanning, alerts and Bar Replay.

Every one of those parts gives a Level A path, usually built on Bar Replay — AmiBroker’s facility for stepping historical data forward one bar at a time. GetPlaybackDateTime() lets a formula know it is being replayed, which is how the course keeps practice sessions distinguishable from live ones.

⚠Warning

Do not buy a data subscription until you have read Part 17 and Part 18.

Provider capabilities, history depth, symbol limits and pricing change, and the two most useful things those parts give you are the questions to ask a vendor and the arithmetic for how much data your intended base interval will actually consume. Part 18’s appendices are dated and state explicitly which claims were verified and which were not.

Optional: your own AFL library

Part 11 builds a small library of helper functions that later parts reference. You can follow the course without it — every formula is self-contained — but the parts from 13 onwards assume you have somewhere to put reusable code.

Setting up

In order, and none of it takes long:

1. Install AmiBroker. The universal installer includes AmiQuote and AFL Code Wizard.
2. Create a database for daily end-of-day data. Part 3 covers the settings that matter and the ones that will cause trouble later if they are wrong.
3. Import quotes for your universe with AmiQuote, or from CSV files.
4. Check the data before trusting it. Part 2’s data-quality work is not optional; run it on your own database as soon as it exists.
5. Create a watch list of the symbols you will use, and note how you built it. That note is the answer to a question the capstone asks.
6. Make a folder for your own formulas, outside AmiBroker’s own Formulas folder — the User’s Guide warns that formulas shipped with AmiBroker are overwritten by the next upgrade.
7. Start a research log. A text file is enough. Part 12 and Part 30 explain why it matters more than any technique.

Downloading the course formulas

Every substantial formula is a downloadable .afl file, listed by part on the downloads page. Save them into your own formula folder, not AmiBroker’s.

The files on the site are the same bytes the lessons display — the site reads them from disk at build time — so a formula cannot drift from its lesson.

What you do not need

Money at risk. Nothing in this course asks you to trade. The capstone ends at a written report.

A powerful computer. AmiBroker is unusually efficient. A large optimisation benefits from cores; nothing else here will strain a laptop.

Statistics training. What you need is built as you go, in plain language, with the limitations stated rather than hidden behind formulas.

Programming experience. AFL is taught from the beginning in Part 8, and the array model lesson is the one that makes the rest of it make sense.

Cost summary

Item	Cost	Needed for
AmiBroker Standard	One-off licence fee	Everything up to Level 4
AmiBroker Professional	Higher one-off fee	Real-time data (Parts 17–26 Level B/C)
AmiQuote	Included with AmiBroker	Free end-of-day data
Free end-of-day data	Free	Levels 1–4 and the capstone
Broker or vendor feed	Monthly subscription	Level B/C only, and entirely optional

Prices change and vary by region, so this course quotes none of them. Get them from amibroker.com and from the vendor directly.

Ready

• How to use this course — structure, callouts, code labels, where to start.
• Part 3 — installing, databases and importing data, in detail.
• The full curriculum.