A General Question About Performance

Alpaca Account Troubleshooting
1

C#; 3.5.0

So this is a general question to everyone, including anyone from Alpaca.

I’m about a month into testing the Alpaca platform as a possible alternative to a competitor that I’m currently using. I’m only testing within the “paper” platform

I’ve been getting periods of instability…disconnections from streaming, orders that don’t go through at all, orders that return as FORBIDDEN. As I dig down, the problems seem to be coming from Alpaca’s backend of the “paper” environment. All issues eventually clear themselves up and everything is fine again.

So my question to everyone who is operating in the “Live” environment is this: are these problems, or similar problems also happening when LIVE? Do you get periods of instability(dead orders, FORBIDDEN orders, broken connections…whatever)?

This question also goes to reps from Alpaca. I understand that paper is not the same as live, but before I bring a bunch of money over, I need to know how stable the live platform is relative to paper…because RIGHT NOW…paper is not a suitable platform for trading…if that is representative of what live is like.

2

Have you looked at the response body for when you get Forbidden? It’s possible to get 403 Forbidden when you don’t have enough buying power, etc. so just trying to narrow down the issue.

3

I actually tested it with 1 share of AAPL stock with $98,000 in the account. So if it came back as not enough buying power, there is something seriously wrong with their logic. My guess is that there is a technical issue on their backend…and that’s what I’m worried about. BTW…it was FORBIDDEN to buy 1 share of AAPL with $294,000 buying power…according to them.

4

Well, insufficient buying power was one example for a 403 Forbidden response. It could really be anything else too like “cannot open a long buy while a short sell order is open” so without knowing the current state of your account at the time of when you placed the order, it’s hard to tell unless you know the response message you received back.