About Alpaca

Who We Are

Alpaca is a technology company headquartered in California Silicon Valley that builds an API-first stock brokerage platform (stock trading is offered through an account with Alpaca Securities LLC, a member of FINRA/SIPC, and crypto trading is offered through an account with Alpaca Crypto LLC, not a member of FINRA/SIPC). We are a team of diverse background individuals across the globe with deep financial and technology expertise, backed by some of the top investors in the industry. We are proud to be supported by the love of enthusiastic community members on various platforms.

Alpaca’s globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage business specialists, who collectively have decades of financial services and technology industry experience at organizations such as FINRA, Apple, Wealthfront, Robinhood, EMC, Cloudera, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers. Alpaca is co-founded and led by Yoshi Yokokawa (CEO) and Hitoshi Harada (CTO/CPO). Our investors include a group of well-capitalized investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Elderidge, and Y Combinator as well as highly experienced industry angel investors such as Joshua S. Levine (former CTO/COO of ETRADE), Nate Rodland (former COO of Robinhood & GP of Elefund), Patrick O’Shaughnessy (“Invest Like the Best” podcast host & Partner of Positive Sum), Jacqueline Reses (former Executive Chairman of Square Financial Services), Asiff Hirjii (former President/COO of Coinbase), Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), and founders of leading Fintech companies including Plaid and Wealthsimple.

Who Is Alpaca For?

Alpaca is built for developers as well as technology-minded individuals and businesses. Our products are used in various ways including automation of investing and trading, building your own version of trading app, and integrating commission-free fractional stock trading services into your business. We have been on the other side of the table being algorithmic traders and building fintech investing apps. This experience drives us everyday to build products that can solve the pain that we ourselves had to go through in the past.

For account types and eligibility, please read Account Plans to learn more.

With an Alpaca brokerage account, users have access to:

• Commission-free fractional trading
• An official API that is constantly being improved and updated
• Easy to understand API documentation
• Free, real-time market data
• Paper trading and sandbox environment for testing your strategies and integrations
• Fully working, example algorithms that can be deployed immediately
• Multiple support channels

Please see the footer of the Alpaca homepage for disclosures.

How Alpaca Works

Why Commission-Free?

At Alpaca, we believe in the power of automation in trading and investing, which is notably different from that of traditional securities brokers. With this belief, we focused on removing obstacles that would prevent such automation from happening. Naturally, automation tends to generate a large number of smaller transactions. At a traditional broker, this might result in an unbearable commission expense that outweighs all other costs. To address that, we made it a point to offer our users commission-free automated trading. This breathes new life into many types of strategies, including those that trade frequently or use small order sizes. It also supports developers and technology-minded individuals in their journey by allowing them to start small and gradually scale up. Ultimately, our customers’ success leads to our success.

How We Make Money?

Securities brokers traditionally generate revenue in multiple ways including charging trading commissions, marking up margin lending rates and stock loan, keeping interest on cash deposits, receiving payment for order flow by routing orders to market makers, and marking up the data feed subscription.

Although we do not charge commissions, Alpaca may generate revenue in some of the same ways as traditional online brokerages. These include:

• Interest on cash deposits
• Payment for order flow (“PFOF”) - Alpaca receives remuneration for routing your orders to market makers and exchanges. PFOF helps us offset the expense that occurs when clearing and executing our customers’ trades. You can read more about PFOF in our Medium post here. For Alpaca Securities SEC Rule 606 disclosures, please click here. It is important to note that our customers are not charged.
• Margin financing - Alpaca may charge interest for margin loans.
• Stock loan - Alpaca may charge stock loan fees for users who want to borrow stock to short sell.

Regulated Financial Institution

At the beginning of 2018 Alpaca Securities LLC (Alpaca Securities) became a member of FINRA and registered with the SEC to provide securities brokerage services. In order for Alpaca Securities to obtain such membership and registration, we had to go through rigorous paperwork and procedure development. Alpaca Securities’ brokerage service and operations are led by David Rafteseth, who has decades of experience running brokerage operations at TD Ameritrade and Pension Financial, and supported by John Torola, who is a FINRA veteran and most recently led the compliance team at one of the biggest robo advisory firms, Wealthfront. The team oversees a brokerage operations team consisting of licensed professionals who came from such firms as Waddell & Reed, TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, Axos Clearing, and Raymond James.

You can check the background of Alpaca on FINRA’s BrokerCheck.

Safety of Your Money

SIPC Membership

Alpaca Securities LLC is a member of SIPC, which protects securities customers of its members up to $500,000 (including $250,000 for claims for cash). Explanatory brochure available upon request or at www.sipc.org.

Cryptocurrency trading is offered through an account with Alpaca Crypto LLC. Alpaca Crypto LLC is not a member of FINRA or SIPC. Cryptocurrencies are not stocks and your cryptocurrency investments are not protected by either FDIC or SIPC.

Systems and Technology

We initially started Alpaca in 2015 as a pure technology company building a database solution for unstructured data, initially visual data and ultimately time-series data.

We believe there are and will be huge innovation opportunities in the financial industry by (re)building technology to make the business scalable and flexible. In order to achieve our vision of providing faster and easier access of financial markets to everyone on the planet, our platform systems, such as accounting system, order management system and FIX clients, are written in Go from scratch and designed for massive scale in the cloud and on-premise. Hitoshi (Co-founder & CTO/CPO), who leads Alpaca’s technology team, comes from Greenplum (he was a lead architect of Greenplum), a parallel distributed database system used globally by major financial institutions and their quant desks, where thousands of database instances are running.

At the same time, we thrive with our strong developer communiy and are grateful to live in the opensource age. Our GitHub hosts variety of opensource SDKs and libraries as well as there are growing number of community-built ones outside of our GitHub. Hitoshi is also a big believer and contributor in the opensource community and built window functions and common table expressions in PostgreSQL, as well as initiated PostgreSQL-related projects such as plv8js.

Alpaca is a truly technology company and is committed to innovating the financial industry using latest technology with community to help everyone on the globe.