Crypto positions disappeared from my paper trading account 5 Nov. 2025 at 4:35:04am ET, "position does not exist"

Alpaca Account Troubleshooting
1

Problem

Go here: Get an Open Position?

Put in your keys and BTCUSD as the symbol (capitalization matters, no slash between BTC and USD).

JSON response:

{
  "code": 40410000,
  "message": "symbol not found: BTCUSD"
}

Why? Because at 4:35:04am ET (+0/-5 seconds) on 5 Nov. 2025, for some reason all of my crypto positions in my paper trading account disappeared! That’s the problem!

I detected it because I have a data logger that’s been running for months and this morning it failed saying all of a sudden I have no open positions in BTCUSD, even though I’ve had that position open in my paper account for months, and the datalogger had been successfully running for months and does not make any trades.

Exceptions caught in Python:

requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 404 Client Error: Not Found for url: https://paper-api.alpaca.markets/v2/positions/BTCUSD
…
alpaca.common.exceptions.APIError: {"code":40410000,"message":"position does not exist"}

Fix

I manually bought $100 back into the BTC/USD position at alpaca.markets, and now it works again since that again gave me an open position in it. But, why did my open crypto positions disappear this morning in the first place!?

2

@Gabriel_Staples Apologies. There was a problem running a batch job which synched paper crypto positions between two internal databases. Because it didn’t run, none of the positions got transferred so it looked like they disappeared from paper accounts. This is being addressed and should be fixed for tomorrow’s positions. Again apologies and thank you for reporting this.

1 Like
3

I’m glad you found it!

4

Dan, the issue is back early today: my BTC/USD is no longer present in my account. And, even worse, when I make new BTC/USD orders manually, they won’t go through. I’ve had multiple buy orders open for hours now, one for $100, one for $10, one for $11, and none are going through.