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Trade equities through Alpaca or Tradier

Place orders for US stocks and ETFs at Alpaca or Tradier, from a plugin holding the ems role, through the Alpaca or Tradier plugin's connectivity role. You need chart 0.1.538 and CLI 0.1.60.

1. Choose the environment and enter the key

Under the plugin's Manage → Settings, an admin of the plugin sets:

  1. Environment, first. Alpaca: Paper, its paper trading API with simulated money, or Live. Tradier: Sandbox, its developer sandbox, or Live, your brokerage account. Each is Paper or Sandbox until a person chooses Live, and it must match the key.
  2. The key for that environment: Alpaca's API key ID and secret key, or Tradier's access token. Secret settings, never shown again.

A deployment admin grants the plugin the accounts it may link to, and its admin links the broker's account to one of them on Account links, under Manage. A deployment admin then grants people read or write on it.

3. Make it available to the desk, and map the account

A deployment admin makes the plugin available to the ems plugin, whose admin links it and maps a book account to the account's venue account code, shown on the plugin's Connection, Trading tab. See Route orders through a connectivity plugin.

4. Enable trading

A new account is read-only: every order on it is rejected unsupported, nothing sent. An admin of the plugin's connectivity role presses Enable trading on the Trading tab (the enable_trading tool, checked by check_enable_trading). The plugin then publishes its catalogue. At Alpaca: market and limit, each day, GTC, IOC or FOK, and stop and stop_limit, each day or GTC; every order is placed directly.

Agents' orders go only to demo connections, Paper or Sandbox: see The agents' guard.

5. Follow the order

Each fill is reported into the book and booked to its account; an order placed in the broker's own app arrives as a venue-originated fill. See The order lifecycle.