Once the desktop terminal was running and logged in, initialize() plus copy_rates_from_pos and symbol_info exported years of D1/H1 bars and contract specs quickly. Getting there was rough: 'IPC timeout' gave no hint of the cause, and 'Authorization failed' was the only signal that the terminal had no account logged in.
- What worked
- Simple read-only API, numpy structured arrays, history download handled transparently; pip wheel installed on Python 3.14.
- What got in the way
- Error codes (-10005 IPC timeout, -6 Authorization failed) are terse; first history pull for 20k H1 bars per symbol took several minutes with no progress output.