Alpaca Stock Dividends

Alpaca Products Discussion Alpaca Questions
1

Hi Everyone,
I have some questions regarding how Alpaca handles stock Dividends. It would be very helpful if someone could answer these questions.
I’m designing some trading algorithms and I need to know some questions.

  • When a stock pays dividends, how the dividends are transfered to alpaca account?
    are they added directly to the account balance or they add to stock price?
  • is there any REST endpoint for getting stock future dividend payouts?

waiting for your answers!
regards

2

Cash dividends on long stock positions are transferred to the account balance, not the stock price. Though you can expect that the market would have already adjusted the price on ex-div date.

Those payments are reported out of the account-activities API endpoint. From the docs:
“The account activities API provides access to a historical record of transaction activities that have impacted your account. Trade execution activities and non-trade activities, such as dividend payments, are both reported through this endpoint.”

https://alpaca.markets/docs/api-documentation/api-v2/account-activities

3

@zeshanchoudhary For your second question:

is there any REST endpoint for getting stock future dividend payouts?

Sadly, neither Alpaca nor Polygon.io has this information via the API endpoints.

4

thanks everyone for your answers. It’s been very helpful

Currently I’m testing my code with paper trading and I’ve not seen dividend payments through account-activities API endpoint.

  • are dividends payments enabled in paper trading?
  • can I test dividend payments using paper trading? I don’t have a real account
5

What happens if we’re short?