Brokerages

Alpaca supports cash and margin accounts. To set the account type in an algorithm, see the Alpaca brokerage model documentation.

Create an Account

Follow the account creation wizard on the Alpaca website to create an Alpaca account.

You will need API credentials to deploy live algorithms with your brokerage account. After you have an account, open the Dashboard page, click the button in the top left to select your real money trading account, and then click Generate New Keys. Store your API Key and Secret somewhere safe.

Paper Trading

Alpaca supports paper trading. When you create an Alpaca account, your account is a paper trading account by default. To get your paper trading API credentials, open the Dashboard page, click the button in the top left to select your paper trading account, and then click Generate New Keys. For more information about their paper trading environment, see their rules and assumptions documentation.

Our Alpaca integration supports the following asset classes:

• US Equities
• Equity Options
• Crypto

You may not be able to trade all assets with Alpaca. For example, if you live in the EU, you can't trade US ETFs. Check with your local regulators to know which assets you are allowed to trade. You may need to adjust settings in your brokerage account to live trade some assets.

You might need to purchase a Alpaca market data subscription for your trading. For more information about live data providers, see Datasets.

We model the Alpaca API by supporting several order types, order properties, and order updates. When you deploy live algorithms, you can place manual orders through the IDE.

Order Types

The following table describes the available order types for each asset class that our Alpaca integration supports:

Order Type	Equity	Equity Options	Crypto
Market
Limit
Stop market
Stop limit
Trailing stop

Time In Force

We model the Alpaca API by supporting the following TimeInForce instructions:

• DayDAY
• GoodTilCanceledGOOD_TIL_CANCELED
• GoodTilDategood_til_date

Updates

We model the Alpaca API by supporting order updates.

Handling Splits

If you're using raw data normalization and you have active orders with a limit, stop, or trigger price in the market for a US Equity when a stock split occurs, the following properties of your orders automatically adjust to reflect the stock split:

• Quantity
• Limit price
• Stop price
• Trigger price

The Alpaca trading for Equity and Equity Options is commission-free. To view the Alpaca trading fees for Crypto, see the Crypto Fees page on the Alpaca website. To view how we model their fees, see Fees.

We model buying power and margin calls to ensure your algorithm stays within the margin requirements. If you have more than $25,000 in your brokerage account, you can use the PatternDayTradingMarginModel to make use of the 4x intraday leverage and 2x overnight leverage available on most brokerages from the PDT rule.

Orders through Alpaca do not experience slippage in backtests. In live trading, your orders may experience slippage.

To view how we model Alpaca slippage, see Slippage.

We fill market orders immediately and completely in backtests. In live trading, if the quantity of your market orders exceeds the quantity available at the top of the order book, your orders are filled according to what is available in the order book.

To view how we model Alpaca order fills, see Fills.

If you trade with a margin account, trades settle immediately

To view how we model settlement for Alpaca trades, see Settlement.

Note the following security and stability aspects of our Alpaca integration.

Account Credentials

When you deploy live algorithms with Alpaca, we don't save your brokerage account credentials.

API Outages

We call the Alpaca API to place live trades. Sometimes the API may be down. Check the Alpaca status page to see if the API is currently working.

You can deposit and withdraw cash from your brokerage account while you run an algorithm that's connected to the account. We sync the algorithm's cash holdings with the cash holdings in your brokerage account every day at 7:45 AM Eastern Time (ET).

The following algorithm demonstrates the functionality of the Alpaca brokerage:

You must have an available live trading node for each live trading algorithm you deploy.

Follow these steps to deploy a live algorithm:

1. Open the project you want to deploy.
2. Click the Deploy Live icon.
3. On the Deploy Live page, click the Brokerage field and then click Alpaca from the drop-down menu.
4. Click on the Environment field and then click one of the environments.

The following table shows the supported environments:

Environment	Description
Paper	Trade with paper money
Live	Trade with real money

5. Check the Authorization check box and then click Authenticate.
6. On the Alpaca website, click Allow to grant QuantConnect access to your account information and authorization.
7. Click the Node field and then click the live trading node that you want to use from the drop-down menu.
8. (Optional) In the Data Provider section, click Show and change the data provider or add additional providers.

In most cases, we suggest using the QuantConnect data provider, the Alpaca data provider, or both. The order you set them in the deployment wizard defines their order of precedence in Lean.

If you add the Alpaca data provider, enter your API key and secret. To get your API key and secret, see Account Types. Your account details are not saved on QuantConnect.

9. (Optional) Set up notifications.
10. Configure the Automatically restart algorithm setting.

By enabling automatic restarts, the algorithm will use best efforts to restart the algorithm if it fails due to a runtime error. This can help improve the algorithm's resilience to temporary outages such as a brokerage API disconnection.

11. Click Deploy.

The deployment process can take up to 5 minutes. When the algorithm deploys, the live results page displays. If you know your brokerage positions before you deployed, you can verify they have been loaded properly by checking your equity value in the runtime statistics, your cashbook holdings, and your position holdings.