Alpaca opening to non-US residents

Freetrade Chat 🔥
#1

Alpaca has announced that it is opening a private beta for non-US residents: https://alpaca.markets/blog/non-us-live-trading-beta/

As you may know, Alpaca offers free trading for US residents, with access to a free API that you can call from anywhere, including quantitative trading software such as QuantConnect, my favourite.

I don’t the exact priority given to FT’s API, but I’d say that more and more millennials+ are learning programming (e.g. python) and API access would be a great selling point for them (and it’d make my rebalancing a lot easier). I’m not saying it should be free, but could be included in the premium version!

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#2

Some of us, like myself, have tried campaigning for this, but the majority don’t seem to like it.

However, I reverse engineered the iOS app by carrying man-in-the-middle attacks on my phone to decipher the API endpoints and to craft my own requests from them. From there, I figured out which endpoint did what via trial and error, and know I currently have my own trading bot running after I created a Python wrapper around the private API.

I’m currently working on implementing technical analysis indicators and information from Simply Wall Street into a reconstructed version of the app that I’ve produced. I don’t really like the excessively basic design of the app, and since there aren’t any other decent options, I took it into my own hands. It would certainly be nice if an overhaul of the app was made, in my opinion.

You’ll probably have to create your own wrapper around the API if you need to programmatically make requests to the API, like I have. I may consider open-sourcing it (the API wrapper) to Github so others can do this too, as I know that there are people out there like me who struggled to garner attention to this topic. Plus, the API I’ve made won’t cost anything - wink, wink.

Good luck on your project @pablo !

6 Likes
#3

@changc would you be open to sharing your API wrapper, potentially for a fee?