In this tutorial series, we will learn about how to place a market order to buy or sell a U.S. Equity or ETF. We will move forward assuming that you’ve registered with Alpaca. If you haven’t please visit Alpaca and sign up. Feel free to check out the other tutorials in this series at Alpaca Resources.
We will use an Alpaca paper trading account to demonstrate how to buy and sell a stock, via the API.
Step 1:
Log in to your Alpaca account and click on “Paper Overview”. That should lead to a web page as shown in the picture below.
As we can see, a new paper trading account has a starting equity of $100,000 and a buying power of $400,000. These can be reset at any time during your usage by clicking the “Reset” button and they will return back to their original equity of $100,000 and a buying power of $400,000 respectively.
Step 2:
Let’s create a class called “pythonBuyBot” and paste our code for the endpoints in the class.
Step 3:
We will create a function called “pythonBuyBot” that places a market order to buy a stock. Similar code can be found on the Alpaca Docs under the orders section.
Step 4:
Similarly let’s create a function to sell a stock, or in this case one stock of Tesla. Again, similar code can be found on the Alpaca Docs under the orders section.
After placing a market order to buy and/or sell, your order history will look like the following (prices will vary)
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Yoshi Yokokawa
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Commission-Free trading means that there are no commission charges for Alpaca self-directed individual cash brokerage accounts that trade U.S. listed securities through an API. Relevant SEC and FINRA fees may apply.
Brokerage services are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC ("Alpaca"), memberFINRA/SIPC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AlpacaDB, Inc. Technology and services are offered by AlpacaDB, Inc.