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Brokers

Alpaca

US stocks and ETFs by hand, on a paper or live Alpaca account.

Trading on margin can lose you more than you put in. Past results, including backtests, do not predict future results. Cloud9Trader provides tools and education, not financial advice. Read the full risk warning.

Alpaca is a US broker for stocks and ETFs. Connect your own Alpaca account to see your balance and positions and to send orders. The connection is new: it is built and tested against Alpaca’s published API but has not yet been run end to end on a paper account, so it is marked beta. Start on Paper and check each order in Alpaca’s own dashboard.

What you can do

Section titled “What you can do”
  • Manual orders: market, limit, stop and stop-limit orders on US stocks and ETFs listed on NYSE, Nasdaq, NYSE Arca, NYSE American and Cboe BZX. An order is DAY unless you choose GTC.
  • Stop loss and take profit: on an entry they go to Alpaca together as a bracket, and both legs start when the entry fills.
  • Fractional shares on stocks Alpaca allows fractions of, as DAY orders with no stop loss or take profit.
  • Account view: your cash, equity, buying power and open positions.

Algorithm sessions cannot trade on Alpaca yet.

Connect

Section titled “Connect”
  1. Open an Alpaca account. Alpaca gives every account a paper account, which trades with play money.
  2. In Alpaca’s dashboard, switch to the paper account and generate an API key. Copy the key ID and the secret, because Alpaca shows the secret once. Paper keys and live keys are different: a paper key never reaches your live account.
  3. In Cloud9Trader, open Exchange API Keys from the user menu. In Alpaca’s row, paste the key ID into API Key and the secret into Secret, leave the choice on Paper, and click Save. A saved key shows which one it runs on.

To trade with real money later, generate keys on the live account, delete the paper key in Cloud9Trader, and save the live keys with Live (real money).

Limits

Section titled “Limits”
  • Stocks and ETFs only. Alpaca’s crypto is not offered.
  • Orders are checked against US market hours before they are sent. Outside the regular session an order is refused, except a DAY or GTC limit order sent for extended hours.
  • Prices must be in Alpaca’s steps: whole cents at $1 and above. A finer price is refused, never rounded.
  • No trailing stops: an order that asks for one is refused, not sent without it.
  • One Alpaca connection per Cloud9Trader account.
Section titled “Read next”
  • Brokers: what every broker supports.
  • Orders: market, limit and stop orders explained.