How to Access Market Data for Free Using Alpaca API?

This tutorial will be a step by step demonstration of how to get market data using the Alpaca API. We will move forward assuming that you’ve registered on Alpaca.  If you have not, please check out the tutorial guides on  “How to register for an account on Alpaca ?” or “How to open a live trading account as a US/ non-US resident?”

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Alpaca is a modern platform for trading. Alpaca’s API is the interface for your trading algorithms, bots, or applications to communicate with Alpaca’s brokerage and other services.

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Alpaca provides market data from various sources. To learn more about data options and which one is right for you, please see this page.

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Alpaca API lets you build and trade with real-time market data for free.

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Step 1:

Let’s create a class called “pythonBuyBot” and paste our code for the endpoints in the class.

Step 2:

Similarly let’s create a function to get market data for Apple(AAPL). Within this function we print out how much AAPL has moved in the specific timeframe.

One can find similar code in the Alpaca Docs

The terminal output should look like this.(Numbers will vary)

Step 3:

Below find a GIF showing everything we have discussed today:

Thank you for using Alpaca. Here are a couple more links that  you might be interested in.

Alpaca GitHub repository

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Alpaca builds an API for free stock trading. Alpaca has 39 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

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Alpaca Blog

Alpaca Blog | API for Stock Trading

Alpaca Blog for product updates, new integration, and more. Alpaca’s commission-free trading API is built for algorithmic trading and building apps

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Alpaca Forum

Alpaca Community Forum

Alpaca user forum for FAQ, feature requests, many discussions around Alpaca stock trading API

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Alpaca API documentation

Documentation | Alpaca

Alpaca API lets you build and trade with real-time market data for free.

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