Question 1

What is Obscura?

Accepted Answer

Obscura is an alternative-data platform for systematic investment research. It collects 122 public and vendor datasets - SEC EDGAR filings, congressional trading disclosures, federal lobbying and contracting, short interest, options flow, market microstructure, central-bank and statistical-agency series, and web attention - normalises them to one schema, and serves them through a typed REST API, Parquet bulk exports and a Model Context Protocol server.

Question 2

What does point-in-time correct mean on Obscura?

Accepted Answer

Every row on every dataset carries available_date: the calendar day the publisher actually made that record available, day-of, with no rounding to the next trading session. Filtering on it is a no-look-ahead filter that means the same thing on all 122 datasets, so a backtest cannot see a value before it existed. Reference-period, real-world-event and revision dates are never overloaded onto it - they live in their own columns (period_start, period_end, occurred_on, revised_at), so the lag between an event and its disclosure is measurable rather than lost.

Question 3

How do I query an Obscura dataset?

Accepted Answer

POST to https://api.obscura.trade/v1/query with an X-API-Key header and a body of {"dataset": "congress_trades", "symbols": ["NVDA"], "start": "2024-01-01", "limit": 1000}. POST /v1/download returns a presigned Parquet URL for a whole dataset. The catalog and each dataset's full field-by-field ontology are public and need no key: GET https://api.obscura.trade/v1/catalog and GET https://api.obscura.trade/v1/catalog/{dataset}/ontology.

Question 4

Can an AI agent use Obscura directly?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Obscura runs a remote Model Context Protocol server at https://api.obscura.trade/v1/mcp, JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP, read only, authenticated with the same API key. Its tools are search_datasets, get_dataset_ontology and how_to_query, so an agent discovers datasets and reads their real schemas instead of inventing columns.

Question 5

What does Obscura cost?

Accepted Answer

Creating an account is free. Core is $49 per month and covers sentiment and congressional trading; Standard covers the full catalog, the API, Console and Data Visualizer, Parquet bulk exports and the complete point-in-time history. Professional carries the same catalog under a professional-use licence and is required for professional traders. Enterprise contracts cover multiple seats, redistribution rights and custom terms.