(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.)<p>This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing.<p>The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching costs and lock-in (looking at you, Reuters and Bloomberg).<p>On the one hand, retail brokers need to support popular programming languages and paradigms to gain traction. So, they are releasing http-based APIs, or popular language-specific libraries/bindings for their proprietary APIs. But, they are doing this instead of pushing well-publicised battle-tested standards such as FIX[1], that would normalise the playing field across brokers. So my gut feel is that they are banking on users coding against their APIs and having some lock-in effects. Notable exception is that any broker that supports cTrader will have a FIX API, because cTrader provides that for them.<p>The problem is: if I write a bunch of code to work against Alpaca, TD Ameritrade, or whoever, that code will likely need to be revisited for some other broker like Robinhood. Granted, market connectivity code _should_ be well abstracted from my model if I'm following good design principles. But at least with FIX, the core concepts, fields, and messages remain the same across most FIX endpoints (NOS, ExecRpt, etc), allowing for a more uniform code holistically.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fixtrading.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.fixtrading.org</a>
Beginner question on a related topic for those of you more knowledgeable than me:<p>Is there a way to get access to the order books on Nasdaq or other exchanges?<p>I'm working on a script that can run stock trading algorithms (and hopefully see some profit).<p>My first trading experience was with crypto on GDAX (now Coinbase Pro). The order book on GDAX is basically available via their API. I've been looking at various stock trading APIs (Alpaca looks interesting as well) and it seems like the only thing that's available are broker APIs that don't share the order book.<p>Is the order book on Nasdaq and other exchanges unavailable to regular folks like me? Is it hidden, available to institutions only, or to some sort of registered brokers?<p>Having first dealt with GDAX and now looking at stocks, it all seems so ambiguous and hidden behind 3rd parties, unclear order execution, etc. (not that gdax was perfect - it has its issues), so I'm just generally confused as to how things work.
Heard about alpaca a while back, so I made this as a small fun side project. The main features are buying, selling, and viewing stocks. In the future I may add additional features if I find something I want to add (or others want to add).<p>The code is just Go, using the cobra library.
Alpaca is great! As far as brokerage APIs go, theirs is top notch and a breeze to code for. The founders are also really responsive and helpful.<p>I know this because I wrote an app that connects to Alpaca accounts (as well as other brokerages) to help people build their own custom index funds [0]. It only took a few weeks to build our Alpaca integration, whereas other brokerages often take months/years just to get access to their APIs.<p>[0] <a href="https://getpassiv.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getpassiv.com/</a>
FYI: "With no commission" is a bug, not a feature. Typically, when you pay commission, you get better prices. Let's say you buy 100 shares of SPY at Interactive Brokers. You pay $1 commission and get it for 268.28. At a free-of-commissions broker, you might get your 100 shares for 268.30. That's $1 more than the trade at IB. TNSTAAFL.<p>It's exactly like how duck typing took over programming in the last decade or so with, "Whee, see, less typing!!", and we lost the value of having static types ("strong typing"). Why are we tempted so easily? Now we have the horror of Javascript everywhere. Even the Node.js founders recoil from their own creation and are going a step in the right direction with Deno.
Would be interesting to tie it into what Elastic published about trading baskets of pharma companies related to drug development (COVID-19 included):<p>Generating and visualizing alpha with Vectorspace AI datasets and Canvas <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/generating-and-visualizing-alpha-with-vectorspace-ai-datasets-and-canvas" rel="nofollow">https://www.elastic.co/blog/generating-and-visualizing-alpha...</a><p>Generating Alpha from Information Arbitrage in the Financial Markets with NLP Datasets: 水涨船高
<a href="https://medium.com/hackernoon/profiting-from-information-arbitrage-in-the-financial-markets-3abfca9806d8" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/hackernoon/profiting-from-information-arb...</a><p>algo guys take
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/algotrading/comments/gkrb6f/generating_alpha_in_a_down_market_with_nlp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/algotrading/comments/gkrb6f/generat...</a>
My main FUD with alpaca.markets is the ability to transfer assets in/out. It doesn't look like they offer ACATS transfers (although there's not much info on this!).<p>Using them for anything beyond entertainment budget is very scary - you may incur substantial tax liability if e.g. they ever go out of business or you choose to use a different brokerage.<p>Any insight here? Am I missing something? Is there any way to transfer holdings out without incurring the cap gains?
What's really cool about Alpaca is the integration with zipline via pylivetrader. This means that you can take your backtested factor models and easily convert them to live trading. Also, they have pretty lax margin requirements. You can borrow 2x the cash you have, 4x for intraday if you're a pattern day trader, and the maintenance requirement is only 25%. And with zero commissions, suddenly it's possible for the average joe retail investor to actually run a legit factor strat. If you're only trading highly liquid securities, it could even make sense to run a intraday only strat at 4x leverage. Lets say you're trading stuff that has spreads around 4 bips, your lost returns are going to be around 10% per year from trading costs. That's certainly a lot and you'll need a kick-ass strategy, but that 4x leverage might let you get there.
You may also like <a href="https://github.com/madnight/wallstreet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/madnight/wallstreet</a> just to get the charts and quotes
Does anyone know why they are US only? Is it because the market is different abroad, because there are no European/Worldwide legal framework or simply because it's easier to start with?
Coincidentally I've also just released a command line client for Alpaca [0] written in Rust along with a library backing it [1].<p>Interesting timing :-)<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/d-e-s-o/apcacli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/d-e-s-o/apcacli</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/d-e-s-o/apca" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/d-e-s-o/apca</a>
What are you folks using this kind of stuff for? The best I can come up with is carefully studying issuers' financial reports and reaching some not very good but close enough conclusion about the state of businesses. At which point paying a few $$ or even $100 in commissions is really irrelevant given how much effort I had to put in ...
You should know in general, though, that no one trades "for free" despite what brokerages say.<p>Your order gets routed, delayed, placed differently, and while you may not immediately see it, your trades are getting a different result than if you explicitly paid a brokerage who charges a commission on it.<p>Learn about "payment for order flow".
Would be nice if the author will add more popular Interactive Brokers[1] support. Alpaca is US bounded and seems not going to change this.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.interactivebrokers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.interactivebrokers.com/</a>
Alpaca is very interesting, I've been following them since the beginning. The sad thing is that I'm not from the US and it's still not available for residents of my country (Paraguay in South America).
go install doesn't work @anegri
# github.com/keybase/go-keychain
cgo-gcc-prolog:203:11: warning: 'SecTrustedApplicationCreateFromPath' is deprecated: first deprecated in macOS 10.15 - No longer supported [-Wdeprecated-declarations]
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Headers/SecTrustedApplication.h:59:10: note: 'SecTrustedApplicationCreateFromPath' has been explicitly marked deprecated here
A problem I've bumped into with Alpaca compared to other services is my bot needs 1 second bars, and I believe Alpaca goes down to 1min bars and nothing smaller.
Shameless plug: I started a YouTube channel on this topic that covers a lot of commission free trading API's, including Alpaca (got featured in their docs), Robinhood Private API, TD Ameritrade, Tradier, and more. I'm seeing a huge growth in interest in developing automated trading bots and algos. With commissions dropping to zero, there is a huge wave of day/swing traders that want to learn Python, so am creating as many tutorials as possible.<p><a href="https://youtube.com/parttimelarry" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/parttimelarry</a>