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Trading API

How to Place a Bracket Order to Manage Entry & Exit?

Alpaca Team
Alpaca Team

This tutorial is a step by step demonstration on how to place a Bracket order and is part of the Alpaca 101 Tutorial Series. We will move forward assuming that you’ve registered on the Alpaca website. If you haven’t please visit Alpaca and sign up. Feel free to check out the other tutorials in this series at Alpaca Resources.

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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.

What is a Bracket order?


A Bracket order is a chain of three orders that can be used to manage your position entry along with a target-exit and stop loss order. It is a common use case of an OTOCO (One Triggers OCO {One Cancels Other}) order.

The first order within bracket order is a long/short order to enter a new position, and once it is filled, either of the last two conditional orders are activated. One of the two closing orders is called a take-profit order, which is a limit order, and the other is called a stop-loss order, which is either a stop or stop-limit order. Importantly, only one of the two exit orders can be executed. Once one of the exit orders is filled, the other is canceled.


How to Create a Bracket Order

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.

Paper Trading Equity
Paper Trading Equity 

Step 2:

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

pythonBuyBot with our API keys
pythonBuyBot with our API keys

Step 3:

Similarly let’s create a function to place a bracket order. Within this bracket order, our first order will be to buy one stock of Apple(AAPL), add a stop-loss and take-profit of 5%.

Code to Submit a Bracket Order
Code to Submit a Bracket Order

One can find similar code in the Alpaca Docs

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

Step 4:

Below find a GIF showing everything we have discussed today:

Code to Submit a Bracket Order via API
Code to Submit a Bracket Order via API

After running the code, this is what your portfolio and order history could look like (prices can vary).

Order History
Order History


Commission Free Algorithmic Trading...Alpaca API?
Commission Free Algorithmic Trading...Alpaca API


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

Alpaca GitHub repository

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

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

Alpaca Forum

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

Alpaca API documentation

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

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Trading API

Alpaca Team

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