Methodology · Directory · Last updated 2026-04-20
How Finance MCP Directory works
How the Finance MCP Directory grades servers and refreshes its catalog.
Scope
The directory tracks MCP servers whose primary use-case is financial markets — market data, brokerage, research, backtesting, or execution. General-purpose MCP servers (e.g. file-system, shell) are excluded.
Grading rubric
Each server receives a composite score across seven criteria. The total score maps to an A–F grade.
| Criterion | Signal | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Official-status | Vendor-maintained (not community) | +2 |
| Maintenance recency | < 30 days since last commit | +2 |
| Maintenance recency | 30–90 days | +1 |
| Schema quality | A (tight schemas) → F (loose) | +3 → −1 |
| Auth model | OAuth 2.0 | +2 |
| Auth model | API key / bearer / hybrid | +1 |
| Idempotency (execution servers only) | Supported | +2 |
| Idempotency (execution servers only) | Missing | −1 |
| License openness | MIT / Apache-2.0 / BSD-3-Clause | +1 |
Grade bands:
- A: ≥ 9 — production-ready, low friction
- B: 7–8 — usable, audit before live trading
- C: 5–6 — workable for research, execution risky
- D: 3–4 — prototype-only
- F: < 3 — not recommended
Refresh cadence
Quarterly manual review + on-demand updates when a listed server ships a material change (new version, license change, maintainer change, reported security incident). Each server entry shows its last-commit date; the catalog-level "Last updated" timestamp reflects the most recent refresh.
Sources
- GitHub repositories (primary): stars, last-commit, license, schema files
- Vendor documentation: official endorsement status, auth models, capabilities
- Anthropic MCP registry
- Community reports: Reddit (r/ClaudeAI, r/algotrading), GitHub issues, Discord
Limitations
- Scoring is heuristic. The weights were tuned against a reference set of 10 servers but carry subjective judgment. Readers should treat the grade as an opinionated starting point, not a certification.
- No live security audit. Grades do not include a code-level security review. Before production use, perform your own audit — especially for community servers with execution scope.
- English-only docs. Servers with documentation solely in non-English languages may be under-scored on "schema quality" due to reviewer accessibility limits.
- No performance benchmarks. Latency, rate-limit behavior, and throughput are not scored here. See the Data-Vendor TCO Calculator for cost modeling; a dedicated MCP latency benchmark is on the roadmap.
- Static catalog. Servers not listed here were either missed during review or deliberately excluded as out-of-scope. Nominate additions via the contact details on /about/.
Editorial independence
Vendors whose servers appear here may have or later develop sponsor relationships with AI Fin Hub. The grading algorithm is deterministic and applied uniformly. Sponsor status, when present, is disclosed on the directory row and at /sponsor-disclosure/. No payment alters grade.
Changelog
- 2026-04-20 — Initial release with 7 servers (Alpaca MCP v2, Polygon MCP, Databento MCP, IBKR CLI MCP, Tradier MCP, Tiingo MCP, NautilusTrader MCP).