Documentation

Welcome to Alpaca! Get familiar with Alpaca and explore the resources.

About Alpaca

Find out who is behind Alpaca and how our business works.

Get Started With Alpaca

Not sure where to start? Here's a few examples to help you get up and running.

TradingView Now Live on Alpaca!

Coming from TradingView? Learn how to connect TradingView to Alpaca.

API Documentation

Take a deep dive into our Web API documentation or check out our client SDKs.

Understand Orders

Learn all about order types and their behaviors that you can use on Alpaca.

Learn About User Protections

We care about how you trade on Alpaca. Learn about how we protect you from margin calls

Alpaca Works With How You Trade

Want to learn about connected apps? Coming from Quantopian? Using zipline, pipeline, or backtrader? Expedite your migration to Alpaca with these guides.

Market Data

Learn about what types of market data are available at Alpaca.

Where Should I Start?

If you need help in getting started, check out our examples and tutorials.

Sign Up and Start Trading!

With an Alpaca brokerage account, you can trade using various methods, including through connected apps or through our Web API.

Sign up for an Alpaca account here.

Read through the Web API Documentation

Learn how API works by read through our Web API document. It describes how our API works in details so you can prepare for your algorithm to interact with it.

You can also learn about SDK for your language. Choose one of the supported ones and start building your idea.

Run Examples

You can learn how the process of algorithmic trading works by actually running a list of sample algorithms written in Python in a paper-trading or live-trading environment.

You can also run code examples for each specific function such as getting market data, placing new orders, and getting a list of existing orders.

Deposit your money

In order to start trading, you need to deposit your money into your account. Go to your dashboard, link your bank account, and initiate an ACH transfer from your bank to your Alpaca account. Please also read our FAQ page for banking, too.

Start live trading

After signing up on the signup page with your email and password, you land on the dashboard where you can view your positions, historical performance, and orders. On the dashboard, you can follow the top-left link to start live trading.

For you to start live trading, you need to open an Alpaca Securities brokerage account. Currently, Alpaca Securities brokerage account is available only for the US residents, and requires you to complete the account application. Once you complete the application, your information is going to be reviewed and approved if everything is good. For more information about account review process, please read Getting Started (Alpaca Securities LLC) section of Alpaca Resources.

Suggestions or questions?
We're always happy to hear from you. You can contribute to these docs on GitHub, or you can join our Community Forum or Community Slack to get help from other community members and the Alpaca team.