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!?
@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.
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.
The paper trading for crypto is entirely broken for a week or so.
I’ve also posted a support ticket for that, but they didn’t provide ETA for the fix.
Live trading works fine, but broken paper is a huge problem - I’m blocked in testing major updates before going live and bring more capital.
Could this problem be escalated please? And it would be great if you could announce ETA for the fix, because this problem seems to be of the highest severity.
P.S. For some reason, the status page (https://status.alpaca.markets/) doesn’t announce any related incidents and outages. It says like paper is 100% healthy - which is absolutely not true.
Update: my crypto positions are restored in my paper account, so the “get open position” API now works since I again have an open position in BTC/USD. But, new BTC/USD buy orders still are not filled. I tried manually on the website just now.
@Gabriel_Staples Both crypto positions and orders should be working fine now. The positions issue had to do with a batch process which synchronizes several internal databases. This process began taking an extremely long time to finish. This was fixed. At the time, the order issue was thought to be related, however it turned out to be something simple and unrelated. That too has been fixed.
Apologies for all the inconvenience and especially how long it took to resolve.
