Brokerages

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

Create an Account

Paper Trading

The Charles Schwab API doesn't support paper trading.

1. In the Initializeinitialize method of your algorithm, set the Charles Schwab brokerage model and your account type.
2. Deploy your algorithm with the QuantConnect Paper Trading brokerage.

Our Charles Schwab integration supports the following asset classes:

• US Equities
• Equity Options
• Index
• Index Options

You may not be able to trade all assets with Charles Schwab. 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 Charles Schwab market data subscription for your trading. For more information about live data providers, see Datasets.

We model the Charles Schwab API by supporting several order types, the TimeInForce order property, 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 Charles Schwab integration supports:

Order Type	Equity	Equity Options	Index Options
Market
Limit
Stop market

Order Properties

We model custom order properties from the Charles Schwab API. The following table describes the members of the CharlesSchwabOrderProperties object that you can set to customize order execution.

Updates

We model the Charles Schwab 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 Charles Schwab trading for Equity is commission-free. To view the Charles Schwab trading fees, see the Pricing page on the Charles Schwab 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 Charles Schwab do not experience slippage in backtests. In paper trading and live trading, your orders may experience slippage.

To view how we model Charles Schwab 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 Charles Schwab order fills, see Fills.

If you trade with a margin account, trades settle immediately

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

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

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 Charles Schwab 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 Charles Schwab from the drop-down menu.
4. Check the Authorization check box and then click Authenticate.
5. On the Charles Schwab website, click Allow to grant QuantConnect access to your account information and authorization.
6. Click the Node field and then click the live trading node that you want to use from the drop-down menu.
7. (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 Charles Schwab data provider, or both. The order you set them in the deployment wizard defines their order of precedence in Lean.

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8. (Optional) Set up notifications.
9. 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.

10. 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.