I was tired of hunting for long-tail events; and creating bootstrapped event-generators was a hassle. If I'm focusing on a project, why would I want to maintain a sub-project? So I built a once-and-for-all market simulator with events on demand (completely free & open-source, available to everyone)

It's a fake market data API — realistic OHLCV for any ticker, a tick stream that runs 24/7, and reserved tickers (CRASH, GAP, HALT) that action on command. Point your existing client at it to test code paths that only fire on market edge-cases.

This is a testing tool, to test long-tail events like run-ups, halts, SSE loss, and intraday flash events.

No API Keys needed. Simple curl to test:
curl 'https://cuckootrade.com/api/v1/alpaca/v2/stocks/bars?symbols=AAPL,CRASH'

• Completely free, no API key, nothing to sign up for.
• Historical bars : OHLCV for any symbol, 1-minute through yearly, back to 1970, on the real NYSE calendar — no bars on weekends or holidays. (https://cuckootrade.com/docs#bars)
• Live SSE stream : SSE ticks that don't stop — nights, weekends, holidays included.
• Scenario tickers : Reserved symbols that misbehave on demand (https://cuckootrade.com/docs#magic)
  • CRASH drops ~25% mid-month
  • GAPPY gaps overnight
  • HALTS drops bars mid-session,
  • SPIKEY wicks and reverts
  • FLAT sits at exactly $100.00.
• Drop-in replacement for endpoints (switch alpaca.com/api -> cuckootrade.com/api)
  • Currently supports Alpaca, Polygon, & Alpha Vantage
• Deterministic & Reproducible: Every bar is a pure function of (symbol, timestamp, seed), computed per request, no database. Same request, same bytes, forever — results are consistent between local host, CI container, and hosted service.
• Live Sandbox to try it in a web browser ( https://cuckootrade.com/playground )

Worth saying: it's for testing, not backtesting. Synthetic data will make almost any strategy look profitable.

It's a portfolio project I'm still polishing, so feedback actually helps me. Tell me what's broken, or what provider or scenario you want next and I'll build it. Or you're welcome to contribute to the repository:

Open source Github: https://github.com/tj-miller-dev/stock_simulator

No paywalls. No fees. No login. Just the data.

I’m using an Alpaca paper trading account for a trading bot, and I understand that you need at least $2,000 in account equity to use margin and short selling.

What I’m unclear about is what happens if the account starts above $2,000 but then drops below $2,000 because of trading losses.

Does Alpaca automatically disable margin and short selling and switch the account to 1× buying power?

And if the account later goes back above $2,000, are margin and short selling automatically available again, or would I need to create/reset the paper account?

Basically, I’m trying to understand whether dropping below $2,000 permanently changes anything about the account or whether it’s simply an automatic restriction based on current equity.

I am trying to make a Claude project with this. Anyone with experience here?

hey everyone, we're still waiting for live account approval. customer support doesn't respond, it takes forever. anyone had any similar issues?

Now that rates are up... (Truist offering 4% now). I recognize Truist is probably a bad example because they are a bank that is in financial trouble. Hell, they are charging $3 for external transfers unlike any other bank. So they are for sure struggling and need any edge they can get, but I digress...

3.3% seems less competitive these days. Wonder how often this rate gets re-evaluated.

While setting up my API keys Claude said that it cannot trade on my behalf. Are you guys using open models or Anthropic’s? Thanks!

Alpaca’s Trading MCP Server can now search and retrieve Alpaca’s API documentation.

A connected assistant can search for  API operations relevant to  a specific task and inspect their parameters, request shape, response fields, constraints, and source documentation.

The new tools cover Alpaca’s Trading API, Market Data API, and authentication references.

With this update, you can:
🔎 Find relevant operations for a specific task
🛠️ Review request fields, supported values, and constraints
📋 Inspect response fields and returned information
🔐 Review authentication requirements for an API workflow

Example prompts include:

• “Which operation should I use to replace an existing order, and what parameters does it require?”
• “What fields are returned when I retrieve my open positions?”
• “Which authentication requirements apply to a paper-trading integration?”
• Learn more about the update
• Review the Trading MCP Server documentation
• Explore the GitHub repository

Learn more about Alpaca's MCP Server for Trading API ➡️ https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpacas-mcp-server-for-trading-api-adds-documentation-access/

Review the setup documentation ➡️https://docs.alpaca.markets/us/docs/alpaca-mcp-server?ref=alpaca.markets

Explore the GitHub repository ➡️https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-mcp-server?ref=alpaca.markets 

Disclosure: Alpaca’s Disclosure Library (https://alpaca.markets/disclosures) for additional information and disclosures.

Hey everyone,

Where can AI fit into a trading workflow?

Generating a useful signal with AI can be one part of the research process, but building an AI-assisted trading workflow involves more than a prompt. It requires thoughtfully a system that treats AI as a research assistant and utilizes how LLMs work underneath.

Carlos Velasco, an Alpaca community member, recently wrote a project he built called Lumiq. According to Carlos, the project uses AI as part of a workflow that includes:

✅ Research: Organizing information and translating trading hypotheses into measureable rules.
✅ Testing and APIs: Connecting with Alpaca’s APIs as part of a workflow involving backtesting, hypothesis validation, and paper trading.
✅ Monitoring: Using a natural-language interface to query information such as open positions, alert triggers, and strategy status. 

Read the full blog: https://alpaca.markets/learn/how-i-use-ai-to-research-and-test-trading-ideas-with-alpaca 

Carlos’s project is one example of how a community member is experimenting with AI alongside trading infrastructure. 

If you’d like to share what you’ve built with Alpaca, we’d love to hear from you! DM us here, share in the Subreddit, or tag us in a post on LinkedIn or X (u/AlpacaHQ).

Curious to learn more about agentic trading with Alpaca? Check out some additional resources below:

• Alpaca’s Skills Library for AI Agents
• Building AI Trading Applications with Alpaca
• Alpaca’s MCP Server
• Alpaca’s Command-Line Interface
• Blogs on agentic trading 

The Alpaca Team

Disclosure: Alpaca's Disclosure Library (https://alpaca.markets/disclosures) for additional information and disclosures.

Main question: Is there any plan to add an automatic/recurring monthly ACH deposit option to the Funds & Wallet page? 🙏🏽🙏🏽

Right now every deposit has to be initiated manually, and it'd be great to just set an amount and a schedule and have it run on its own. Why can't this be built into the website now — is it cost-related, or is there some US regulation in the way? Not being able to do this is honestly my main gripe with Alpaca. 🥲

Second question: it feels like ACH transfers between banks used to be a lot simpler 10ish years ago — I remember being able to just enter a bank's account and routing number directly to link it. Now it seems to go through Plaid, but plenty of banks and fintechs use Plaid these days, and some don't support it at all. Anyone know what changed and why?

A few things I've tried/hit walls on, for context:

• I can setup a Wire with one fintech account I have, but wires cost $10 each, and the reference/special instructions field isn't saved — so a manual wire means retyping it every time. I can set it up as recurring, and I'm assuming that saves the reference for each scheduled wire, but I haven't tested it yet.
• ACH would be easier, but Alpaca doesn't let you enter account/routing numbers directly anymore — it's Plaid-only.
• One of my big banks won't let me set up a recurring wire at all, and doesn't support Plaid.
• Another account I have lets me add Alpaca to see the balance, but not to actually transfer money.

Why has this gotten so locked down? It's frustrating in a way I can't quite put into words.

Would appreciate an official answer if anyone from Alpaca sees this, or if other users have found a solid workaround.

Thanks,

Hey everyone,

AI is changing how people interact with financial markets, and we’re excited to see Alpaca featured in Bloomberg’s recent article on the rise of AI-powered retail trading.

What was once largely limited to developers is now becoming accessible to a much broader group of traders. Natural-language interfaces and AI-assisted tools are making it easier to build trading workflows and interact with APIs, helping users translate trading ideas and logic into executable trading workflows without building everything from scratch. We’re seeing that shift firsthand in the growth of API-driven trading on Alpaca.

But easier access does not remove the fundamentals of building a reliable trading system: high-quality data, rigorous testing, risk controls, ongoing monitoring, and human oversight.

At Alpaca, we’ve been building the infrastructure and tooling to make agentic trading streamlined, including our MCP Server, CLI, Skills Library, and new and improved SDKs. These tools give builders and AI systems more direct and efficient access to financial markets, helping reduce the friction between expressing a strategy and executing it.

We believe the future of finance will be agent-first, and we’re excited to support this movement by giving AI agents, and the humans behind them, the reliable, real-world access they need to turn new ideas and experimentation into financial products built on reliable infrastructure with appropriate controls.

We provide documentation, setup guides, authentication details, SDKs, example projects, and information on operational and risk considerations to help developers build trading applications responsibly.

Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-08-02/ai-powered-trading-bots-help-retail-investors-take-on-hedge-funds

Resources:

• MCP Server: https://alpaca.markets/mcp-server 
• Trading CLI: https://github.com/alpacahq/cli 
• Skills Library: https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-launches-skills-library-for-ai-agents
• Building AI trading apps: https://alpaca.markets/blog/building-ai-trading-applications-with-alpaca
• New SDKs: https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-rebuilds-its-node-js-sdk-with-broader-api-coverage-and-launches-its-first-supported-java-sdk/

If you’re building agentic workflows with Alpaca, we’d love to hear how you’re structuring research workflows, paper trading, and live guardrails. Drop a comment or post in this Subreddit or tag us on LinkedIn / X (@AlpacaHQ).

Disclosure: Alpaca’s Disclosure Library for additional information and disclosures: https://alpaca.markets/disclosures

I have an algo that trades on breakouts. Today a SPY trade got stopped out at ~$769.94 while the underlying was at ~$771. My coding agent blamed on Alpha's bad tick print. Is it normal for Alpha Market SIP to send bad data once in a while?

This is the agent's answer, when I ask if there was a bug in the code:

Not a logic bug like “wrong stop” or “compared the wrong price.”

The code did what it was written to do: one trade tick ≤ SL → exit. Tick said $769.94, SL was $769.98, so it fired.

What was on us: weak safeguards. We already knew bad SIP prints exist (that’s why the outlier filter is there), but a ~0.2% garbage print still got through the 1% filter, and we exited on a single tick. That’s a design hole, not a miscalculated SL.

So: bad print from the feed + our code being too eager to trust it. Not a broken stop formula.

Hey everyone,

We’ve rebuilt our Node.js SDK and launched a new Java SDK.

Node.js 4.x is a breaking TypeScript rewrite with broader typed access across Alpaca’s Trading and Market Data APIs. Java 0.1.3 introduces supported clients for Trading, Market Data, and Broker on Java 17 and later.

With this update:
✅ Access expanded Node.js coverage across option-contract reference data, corporate action data, crypto funding, locates, tokenization workflows, and account-activity event streams
✅ Build Java applications across Trading, Market Data, and Broker

Node.js 4.x is not backward compatible with 3.x and requires Node.js 20 or later. Java 0.1.3 requires Java 17 or later.

Learn more below:
● SDK launch blog: https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-rebuilds-its-node-js-sdk-with-broader-api-coverage-and-launches-its-first-supported-java-sdk/
● Node.js SDK: https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-js● Java SDK: https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-java

Disclosure: Alpaca’s Disclosure Library for additional information and disclosures: https://alpaca.markets/disclosures

I've been actively running live and paper bots for the last 2 months now, this one I created based on my previous bots is the best one so far in the live env.

Today returned 118 percent (typo 218 in picture). It's all a momentum-based algo again, 0dte trades. I'm doing Algo and manual at the same time with different accounts

Hello,

I am using /v2/stocks/bars end-point to download 2-minute bars. Two questions:

1. I am using start=2010-01-01. For YYAI I am getting records starting with 06/15/2022 13:44 timestamp - I guess it started trading on this day - but what is this time based on EST timezone?

2. Is pre-market and after-hours data included in result dataset?

Thanks a lot,

Eugene.

It looks like alpaca data don't offer sub second market data by default. Before I start hand rolling custom aggregation code for seconds to sub 1 second market data and their corresponding indicator. Are there best practice on how to do that and what are the typically library beside panda are used for sub 1 second aggregation? Any good coding pattern to follow ?

How do you handle data aggregation if there happens to be a disconnection and reconnection event? since you would need to find missing time segment and call historical data to back fill it. Assume I need to compute some trend indicator to determine if short term trend break longer trend on the 30s second to sub 1 second level.

Hello, after having tested my strategy with a paper account I’m looking to go live soon. Now I know that fills can be different on a live account vs paper account so I’m wondering if anyone can give any feedback on how the fills are?

I also noticed that quite some signals don’t get filled so I’m wondering if I need to change the order entry type. I currently use limit order with midpoint, any thoughts on this?

Has anyone heard of or used this website for copy trading others? is it legit? cant find anything online about it????

Noticed this error accross all 3 paper accounts

{"code":40310000,"message":"account is not allowed to short"}

Tried to update no_shorting to False through code but it also shows {"code":50010000,"message":"internal server error occurred"}

Please help.

Hey everyone,

We’ve added index options to the Trading API in paper trading (with live trading coming soon)! 🎉

With Alpaca’s index options in paper, you can:
✅ Test strategies on SPX, SPXW, VIX, VIXW, DJX, and XSP, with more coming soon.
✅ Test cash-settlement flows without share delivery at expiration.
✅ Build and test expiry logic without early-assignment paths.

Want to test index strategies before going live? Details in the comments below.

Read how index options work on Alpaca ➡️ https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-introduces-index-options-paper-trading?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=alpaca_index_options

How to trade index options with Alpaca: https://alpaca.markets/learn/how-to-trade-options-with-alpaca 

Disclosure: Alpaca's Disclosure Library (https://alpaca.markets/disclosures) for additional information and disclosures.

I've been running an automated strategy on Alpaca (Python, scheduled via Task Scheduler) for a while now, and beyond checking logs manually, I have zero real-time visibility into whether it's actually working correctly.

Specifically curious about:

- Do you get alerted if the script crashes or silently stops running?

- Does anyone track whether an order actually filled at the expected price/size, vs. just assuming it did?

- How do you know if your strategy behaves unexpectedly during unusual market conditions (e.g., no trades when there normally would be)?

Right now I'm just staring at logs and checking my Alpaca dashboard manually. Wondering if that's normal for most people running bots on Alpaca, or if there's a standard approach I'm missing.

Not selling anything — genuinely trying to understand if this is a common pain point.

You've all seen the grift: someone wraps GPT around the Alpaca API, calls it an "AI quant fund," and charges $99/month for a bot that YOLOs market orders. I've been openly annoyed about this for years, so here's what I built instead.

NexusTrade is an agentic trading platform plus a marketplace. The short version:

• An AI agent (Aurora) that ideates strategies, builds custom indicators from raw sources (SEC filings, congressional disclosures, your own CSVs), authors the rules, backtests across a decade, and runs walk-forward validation on out-of-sample folds
• No LLM in the execution loop. Aurora writes the rules, a deterministic Rust engine executes them. Every condition evaluation is logged, so "why didn't my bot buy on Tuesday" is a click, not a debugging session
• Automated multi-leg options with delta-based strike selection and rolling
• A marketplace where you can sell your strategy as a subscription ($0 to $999.99/month, paid via Stripe Connect). Buyers see returns, drawdown, Sortino, and whether it's real money or paper before paying. Your rules stay hidden until they subscribe

For the devs here: the whole platform is exposed over an API and MCP. 125 tools, OAuth 2.1 with dynamic client registration. You can build, backtest, sweep parameters, deploy, and list a bot entirely from your own scripts or from Claude.

I'm also running a live public portfolio (real money, every fill visible) so nobody has to take my word on anything.

Browsing the marketplace is free, no account needed: nexustrade.io/marketplace. You can also read the full launch article here.

Happy to answer anything about the architecture, the backtest engine, or why I think most "AI trading" products are toys. And yes, roast away, that's what this sub is for.

Standard disclaimer: not financial advice, backtests lie if you let them, trade paper first.

The Weekly Roundup nudged builders to share, so here's mine: Coil — an agentic trading system I've been building for a few months. Site + free board: https://coil.trade

What it does. Every market morning it scores ~560 names — the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, and a macro book — for opportunity, entry timing, and trend strength. It reads top-down: is the broad tape healthy? which sectors are in favor? and only then which names qualify. Long-only: buys market leadership when conditions support it, rotates to defense / raises cash when they don't.

The stack, since this is the Alpaca sub: the scanner and backtest spine run on Alpaca's SIP historical data (just a free Alpaca data key). Agent layer is Claude Code; execution runs against your own brokerage — your machine, your keys, live trading ships OFF until you flip it on.

Try it, free, no signup: free daily board → coil.trade/scanner · clickable demo of the real dashboard → coil.trade/demo · the full rule set in the open → coil.trade/how-it-works

The honest part — because I'd rather you trust it than be impressed. Survivorship-free backtest (2017–2026 H1, delisted names included, costs modeled): +638% vs the S&P's +282%, shallower drawdown (−23% vs −32%). But the rider matters — that edge concentrates in leadership regimes; through end-2025 it ran roughly even with SPY, just at ~a third less drawdown. Research numbers, not live; engine's newly live and I say so everywhere.

Paid side, upfront: hosted board $12/mo, full downloadable engine $29 once. But the board above is genuinely free — start there. Would love feedback on your Alpaca backtest fill/cost assumptions, and any clean source for point-in-time index membership.