Community
At Alpaca, we believe that open source and the community around it can change financial systems and how we interact with them. It is our commitment to contribute to the community as much as possible. To start, we have set up a few initiatives where you can learn from and contribute.
As you continue on your journey of automated trading, there are many questions and hurdles that might arise while trying things out. Because of this, we have set up several community spaces for automated traders to gather and share knowledge.
Community Slack
Alpaca’s community Slack has grown to be the go-to place for Alpaca users regardless of experience or where they are in the journey of trading. The community consists a variety of users, from experienced traders to beginners and many in-between. The community Slack is the place where community members can chat, ask questions, provide feedback, discuss the market, analyze algorithms and more together.
There are multiple channels that all new users automatically are added to in the community Slack: #announcements, #community, #dev-all, #feedback, #q-and-a, and #trading.
#announcement - Everyone automatically joins here. This is a ready-only channel for the community members and is a place where you can find feature updates and read official announcements from Alpaca.
#community - Everyone automatically joins here. Jump right in to discussions, ask questions, and maybe, make new friends!
#dev-all - Everyone automatically joins here. All development languages are welcome here, whether it’s Python, Go, JavaScript, or more. Just specify what you’re working in and get feedback or chat about your code in this channel.
#feedback - Everyone automatically joins here. Provide feedback to the Alpaca team! Whether it’s about the logo, login flow, feature requests, or something else, leave a note here. The team really appreciates your time, effort and thoughts.
#q-and-a - Everyone automatically joins here. A dedicated channel for questions.
#trading - Everyone automatically joins here. “Trading” normally refers to live trading in the Alpaca community, but you’re more than welcome to join #trading-papertrading or #trading-algo to discuss paper trading or algorithmic trading, respectively.
Any #project- channels - Any channels that start with “project” are user-created channels for Alpaca-based projects. You are welcome to create one, too!
Slack Integration
Alpaca for Slack is the official Slack integration for Alpaca. It allows you to manage your Alpaca portfolio from any Slack community where it’s installed. It’s already available in our community Slack - just type /alpaca help there to get started, or check this page for more details.
Forum
Alpaca’s community forum is recommended venue for Alpaca users to discuss topics ranging from trading, algorithms, programming, market data, etc. The forum is also a place to find up-to-date announcements about Alpaca and its features. The forum is the recommended place for discussion, since it has more advanced indexing and search functionality compared to our other community channels.
There are various topics set up for users to discuss, including:
Ask the Community - Start here if you have any questions on how to use Alpaca, questions about code, etc.
Alpaca - Feature Requests - This category is for discussion on types of features you’d like to see implemented. What new features would you like to see implemented? What is the use case for this feature? How would it be helpful for you?
Programming - Questions & Issues - Users can post questions or issues regarding Alpaca technology and receive help.
Alpaca Resources: Code Examples & Use Cases
Alpaca Resources has become a publication where community members contribute their experience and know-how in a more comprehensive format. There are a number of comprehensive instructions and how-to guides such as full code snippets of trading strategies and an infrastructure setup overview covering which cloud services to use.
If you want to read more about the market, trading strategies, coding, and other topics discussed in the community Slack, Automation Generation offers you many comprehensive posts that should help you along the way.
Popular posts from Alpaca Resources include:
Google Spreadsheet to Manage Your Stocks Using API
HFT-like Trading Algorithm in 300 Lines of Code You Can Run Now
How to Build a DIY Socially Responsible Investing Robo - A Farewell to Swell
Exploring the Differences between U.S. Stock Market Data Feeds
Concurrent Scalping Algo Using Async Python
Algorithmically Detecting (and Trading) Technical Chart Patterns with Python
Ultimate List of Automated Trading Strategies You Should Know — Part 1
GitHub
Since we started Alpaca in 2015, we have been actively contributing our code to the open source community. Our community members use this open source IP for their trading strategies as well as enhancing their infrastructure.
You can see all open-sourced projects started by Alpaca here that you can fork and use. Here are popular ones you may want to check out:
marketstore - The origin of Alpaca is a database company (hence our official company name is AlpacaDB, Inc.). We built a database from scratch called MarketStore, which is a database server optimized for financial time-series data just like an extensible DataFrame service accessible from anywhere in your system, at higher scalability.
pylivetrader - A simple python live trading framework with zipline interface. The main purpose is to run algorithms developed in the Quantopian platform in live trading.
alpaca-trade-api-python - A python library for the Alpaca trade API. It makes rapid trading algo development easy, with support for both the REST and streaming interfaces.
alpaca-trade-api-js - A Node.js library for the Alpaca trade API. It makes rapid trading algo development easy, with support for both the REST and streaming interfaces.
alpaca-trade-api-csharp - A .NET/C# library for the Alpaca trade API. It makes rapid trading algo development easy, with support for both the REST and streaming interfaces.
alpaca-rn-mobile - An example react native mobile app that allows basic brokerage functions including submitting orders to buy/sell stocks, canceling orders, liquidating positions, and enabling and disabling your API access. Here are links to the working app in the iOS App Store and the Android version in the Google Play Store.
Medium Publication - Automation Generation
Automation Generation has several popular posts for quants and algorithmic traders.
Popular posts from Automation Generation include:
Commission Free Trading: Is it helping or hurting you?