The support article on what flags an account as non-retail lists this first:
“Large Ticket Size: If the average order size is greater than 10,000 shares or over $200,000 in notional value per trading day.”
That sentence reads two ways to me and they’re very different in practice, so I’d like to know which is intended.
- Is the $200,000 a limit on the average order’s notional value? i.e. my typical order is over $200k. Or is it on the total notional traded across the day, the sum of all orders?
- If it’s the daily total, is it measured one-way (entries only) or round-turn (buys plus sells)?
Small orders in a liquid symbol can add up to a large daily total without any single order being remotely large. Under the second reading an ordinary retail-size strategy could cross the line; under the first it never would. This wording is the only place I’ve found this described and it’s load-bearing for how I size things.
Separately, on routing: under the commission-free model, does a non-marketable limit order (say a buy resting at the inside bid) get posted to an exchange book where it earns time priority in the public queue, or is it held at the execution partner and filled when they choose to internalize against it? It changes how a resting limit order should be expected to behave and I haven’t found it documented.
@TannerS17 you asked :
“Is the $200,000 a limit on the average order’s notional value? i.e. my typical order is over $200k. Or is it on the total notional traded across the day, the sum of all orders?”
This refers to your typical notional order size. As long as most (and perhaps ideally) all of your orders are under $200,000, you can trade as much as you want on any given day. There is no limit on the sum of all your orders.
“If it’s the daily total, is it measured one-way (entries only) or round-turn (buys plus sells)?”
As noted above, there’s no limitation on the total traded.
“Under the commission-free model, does a non-marketable limit order (say a buy resting at the inside bid) get posted to an exchange book where it earns time priority in the public queue, or is it held at the execution partner and filled when they choose to internalize against it?”
Orders executed using the commission-free model are routed to Single Dealer Platforms (SDPs) and generally not directly to exchanges. Orders will remain with the execution partner until they are filled. Partners, however, are incentivized to fulfill orders promptly. Alpaca continually rates execution partners on a number of criteria, including the following, and speed of execution is explicitly one of them.
- Execution pricing at or better than NBBO
- Fulfillment rates for non-marketable orders
- Speed of execution
Hope that answers your questions.
Yes, thank you for your help!