Do I have to wait for 3 days for trade to settle before buying anything again?

Looks like Alpaca is complaining that I do not have enough buying power. But it shows clearly I have the buying power.

The way that I understand it, it is not necessary to wait for a trade to settle before spending the proceeds of a trade and I have never encountered orders failing due to this. I don’t use the phone app, but I noticed that your image has a yellow circle at “shares”, maybe try to change that to “Dollars” instead.

My guess is that one would only use the “shares” option if one was closing a short trade.

@yann

The error you are getting is insufficient ‘day trading buying power’. There are two separate ‘buying powers’. One is RegT buying power and the other is 'Day Trading buying power. RegT buying power is how much you have to spend for securities you will be holding overnight (or longer). Day Trading buying power is how much you have available to open positions you intend on holding just for the day (ie ‘Day Trade’). Those two numbers will often be different. The buying power value on the home page is the maximum of those two. To see each separate buying power look at the the Accounts->Balances page as shown below.

There is information on buying powers and the protections in place for those in the docs here and here.

Does that help?