Who can I contact? Please help. I did not order these things algorithmically. I used the website alpaca.markets to put in a limit buy order for the shares you see in the image. Now those shares are sold except 2 shares of GME. Please help me. That’s all the money I have. I need my money/shares back.
Hello @Sharkboy,
Please contact support@alpaca.markets immediately with your account info and a description of exactly what happened.
Jason from Alpaca
I sent my message but I received this message. Can you guys please get to it tonight? I fear it might be too late otherwise. Thanks.
If you were buying on margin, you may have hit the minimum margin maintenance threshold, which will cause Alpaca (or any broker) to close your positions.
See: Margin & Short Selling - Documentation | Alpaca
There’s a section named “Maintenance Margin” which says “Maintenance margin is the amount of cash or marginable securities required to continue holding an open position.”
Note: I don’t work for Alpaca, but I saw your post and figured I’d respond … IMO this is probably what happened, but I’m sure the Alpaca support people can confirm it or not.
Its definitely a margin issue, I don’t know why alpaca doesn’t just have it disabled by default for a new user. It’s dangerous for both the security and the user when margin is accidentally used.
Essentially margin is borrowing money from the broker to buy stock. When you use that borrowed money, you have to maintain a certain amount of cash (minimum margin maintenance threshold) to keep holding the stock. If you are under that level, the broker will sell to reduce risk. If you use margin money from the broker to buy stock, they have the right to sell that stock at end of day if you don’t have enough to satisfy the margin requirements.
On volatile stocks like AMC and GME, these margin requirements are much higher because they are much riskier, meaning it was much easier to get under the necessary maintenance margin, hence why you got hit with those sells. Chances are, you probably didn’t even realize you borrowed some money (you were probably only borrowing very little), but because of the risk of the symbol, that was enough for the Maintenance margin to get a hit.
(FYI Cash is the amount of actual money that is yours on the account. Buying power includes the amount of money you can borrow. Always keep an eye on the cash number and make sure you have above 0, otherwise you might be using margin)
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