No-Code Trading With Alpaca and Zapier

What is Zapier?

Zapier is a no-code tool that lets multiple applications talk to each other, helping to automate repetitive tasks that require interaction between applications. It helps you automate workflows where you need a certain event to happen and take an action.

A workflow created using Zapier is called a Zap. Every Zap has a trigger and one or more actions. A trigger is an event that starts a Zap, and an action is what your Zap does for you. When a Zap runs, each action it completes counts as one task1. You can learn more about Zapier triggers and actions here.

Zapier’s Integration with Alpaca

Now that we know what Zapier is and how it works, let’s take a look at what it can help us do in regards to Alpaca. Alpaca has an integration with Zapier that lets you perform actions on your live trading account. This integration lets you set a trigger event and actions to go along with it. This lets you choose from a wide variety of possible triggers that can help you trigger an action on your Alpaca account.

Let’s take a look at how our workflow is going to be split up:

1. Choose an app and event trigger
2. Define an action on Alpaca (buy/sell trade)
3. Test our workflow (Zap)

Create your Zap

Before we begin creating our Zap, you will need to create an account with Zapier. You can do that here. You must also have an Alpaca account that is funded to link with Zapier. An Alpaca account can be created here. Once you have created an account with both Alpaca and Zapier, navigate to the Zapier dashboard and click on the “Create Zap” button on the left toolbar.

Choose an App

There are over 5000 applications to choose from when setting a Trigger. For this article, we will use Twitter to set a Trigger.

From the list of applications as shown above, select twitter.

Create a Trigger

Once the application is selected, we need to choose an event Trigger. This is the event that our Zap will look for when taking an action on our Alpaca account. Twitter offers several trigger options to choose from. Some of them are “Liked Tweet”,”Search Mention” and “User Tweet”. We will go ahead and select “User Tweet” as our event as shown in the image below. “User Tweet” triggers an event when a specific user of our choice tweets.

Once our event is set, Zapier will prompt you to connect your Twitter account. Follow the prompts presented by Zapier to connect your Twitter account. Now that our account is set, we need to specify a specific Twitter user, who when tweets, should trigger our event. For our hypothetical example, we will choose @AlpacaWeb3 as the account to trigger our events. Whenever this account tweets, we will place an action on Alpaca.

Create an Action

Now that we've set our Trigger, we will set our trade action on Alpaca. In this example, we will buy $10 worth of ETHUSD. As we did while selecting Twitter from a list of applications, we will select Alpaca here. Please select Alpaca tagged “Latest” and “Beta” as the action app for this step. This is the application on the top left in the image below.

Alpaca’s integration with Zapier supports a range of trading endpoints that we can use to automate our workflow. The possible action events are shown in the image below. Once we have selected Alpaca as our action application, we need to choose an event type. We need to select "Place Order."

Once the event type is selected, Zapier will prompt you to connect your Alpaca account with Zapier as shown below.  Please follow the steps to connect your Alpaca account with Zapier. Once connected, Zapier will have access to your live trading account.

Now that we have connected our Alpaca account, we can go ahead and set up the action event. This is where the magic happens. In order to place a $10 Buy order for “ETHUSD”, you will need to set the following fields:

1. Symbol : ETHUSD
2. Side: Buy
3. Notional Value : 10
4. Type: Market
5. Time in Force: gtc

Please refer to Alpaca docs for a better understanding of the required fields when placing a trade. You can place a trade for any asset tradable on Alpaca (Eg: AAPL, COIN, SNAP, BTCUSD, etc.) in the example above.

Once we have set our action event, we are ready to test our Zap. You can do this by clicking on the “Test and Review” button. Testing your Zap with the example settings noted above will create a real order on Alpaca. You should see a $10 buy order for “ETHUSD” on Alpaca dashboard similar to what is shown below.

Similarly, we can set up Zaps to place a sell order on Alpaca using similar trigger events as we saw above.

Publish your Zap

Hooray!! You have finally completed your Zap and are now ready to publish it. You now know how to create a Zap, using Twitter to set a trigger and place a trade on Alpaca when someone tweets.

Sources

1. https://zapier.com/learn/zapier-quick-start-guide/quick-start-the-basics/

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