# Cost Basis / Insufficient Day Trading Buying Power - whats wrong?

**URL:** <https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/cost-basis-insufficient-day-trading-buying-power-whats-wrong/4500>\
**Category:** Random\
**Created:** [February 17, 2021, 7:27am UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/cost-basis-insufficient-day-trading-buying-power-whats-wrong/4500 "2021-02-17T07:27:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Chris\_S](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.alpaca.markets/chris_s/32/2125_2.png) [@Chris\_S](https://forum.alpaca.markets/u/Chris_S)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2021, 7:27am UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/cost-basis-insufficient-day-trading-buying-power-whats-wrong/4500/1 "2021-02-17T07:27:08Z")

</div>

Hello,

since yesterday my app spits out some errors that it cant open positions due to insufficient buying power. This is the API response error:

“StatusCodeError: 403 - {“code”:40310000,“cost\_basis”:“149898”,“daytrading\_buying\_power”:“60783.8252”,“message”:“insufficient day trading buying power”}”,

That confuses me big time as my account information shows these values

“buying\_power”: “220437.348”,

```
"regt_buying_power": "220437.348",

"daytrading_buying_power": "60783.8252",

"cash": "-5206.326",

"portfolio_value": "225643.674",

"pattern_day_trader": true,

"trading_blocked": false,

"transfers_blocked": false,

"account_blocked": false,

"trade_suspended_by_user": false,

"multiplier": "4",

"shorting_enabled": true,

"equity": "225643.674",

"last_equity": "175150.71",

"long_market_value": "230850",

"short_market_value": "0",

"initial_margin": "115425",

"maintenance_margin": "173137.5",

"last_maintenance_margin": "100491",

"sma": "3504.364",

"daytrade_count":

```

According to the docs day\_trading\_buyingpowr is 4 ( last\_equity - last\_maintenance\_margin) which in my case is 4\*(175175.71 - 100491) which is roughly 298K.

So my BP was enough to open the position which said cost basis 149K.

Please someone explain why this happens as I cant find out the reason for it and it really annoys me losing money cause of wrong calculations.

Regards

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![JG\_Lee](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.alpaca.markets/jg_lee/32/2166_2.png) [@JG\_Lee](https://forum.alpaca.markets/u/JG_Lee)\
**Post date:** [February 25, 2021, 3:26pm UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/cost-basis-insufficient-day-trading-buying-power-whats-wrong/4500/2 "2021-02-25T15:26:42Z")

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I have the same issue

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jabowery](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.alpaca.markets/jabowery/32/1495_2.png) [@jabowery](https://forum.alpaca.markets/u/jabowery)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 3:11pm UTC](https://forum.alpaca.markets/t/cost-basis-insufficient-day-trading-buying-power-whats-wrong/4500/3 "2021-03-08T15:11:10Z")

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Paper trading: It started happening to me this morning for the first time:

$195,497.81 Buying Power

Resetting the paper trading account to $100k (new API keys) fixed the problem.