Absolutely DO NOT USE Alpaca if you trade crypto!!!
Short Version: I have experienced multiple instances where I have set stop-limit orders 20-30% below the current market price and a price glitch on their end caused those stop-limit orders to execute despite being 20-30% below the current market price. I have reached out to their support to work with them to get this resolved, but they have been absolutely terrible to work with and left me out to dry for THOUSANDS of dollars.
Long Version:
Issue 1: Orders executed at the incorrect price
YFIUSD: My stop limit was set to $10,115. Looking at the minute chart on Alpaca’s website on 12/12/24 05:37, you can see that the price experienced an obvious pricing glitch where it opened at $11,469, dipped 14.25% down to $9,835, then rose back up 16.36% to close at $11,444, all in the span of 60 seconds. This was an obvious pricing glitch that triggered my stop limit order 14% below the current market price and caused my position to get incorrectly liquidated.
SUSHIUSD: My stop limit was set to $1.88. Looking at the minute chart on Alpaca’s website on 12/11/24 19:19, you can see that the price experienced an obvious pricing glitch where it opened at $2.5, dipped 24.8% down to $1.88, then rose back up 34.57% to close at $2.53, all in the span of 60 seconds. This was an obvious pricing glitch that triggered my stop limit order 25% below the current market price and caused my position to get incorrectly liquidated.
Issue 2: Incorrect positions reissued for both SUSHIUSD and YFISUD
After a week of continuously reaching out to their support team, they finally replied and reissued me shares of both SUSHIUSD and YFIUSD but this was not the resolution I asked for. I had asked that they honor the sale as if it had been executed at market price when the glitch occurred. And on top of that they were reissued at the incorrect sale price, which doesn’t make any sense. Reissuing them a week later also doesn’t make any sense as I was denied the opportunity to mange my position, and in the case of YFIUSD I was reissued ABOVE the current market price! Meaning that I was already down money when they appeared in my account. I would have been better off just placing a market order at the current price. I lost $1,391.73 due to the pricing glitch and their attempt to resolve it just made it worse.
After they acknowledged that they should not have reissued the shares in the manner they did, they went silent for another week before just reopening new positions in my account on Christmas Eve without telling me again at the incorrect price. Do you know how insane it is to open crypto positions in someone’s account for thousands of dollars without telling them on Christmas Eve? I lost more money from them doing this because the price had dropped again by the time I had realized that they reissued these shares.
Again, I reached out to them, bringing up flagging that they clean up this mess and cover my losses for these reissued shares that I never asked for, but they refused and went silent again. After about another week of me reaching out to them, I got escalated to someone higher up who then opened SHORT positions in my account without telling me, which to me is even MORE DIABOLICAL. Luckily, I caught those pretty quickly and closed them. But it has been an absolute nightmare to deal with them for errors that they are 100% at fault for.
Finally, they credited my account $400, despite me losing upwards of $3,000 total between the error of the stop losses being executed way below market price, and the losses incurred from them reopening positions in my account without telling me, and the price plummeting before I realized what’s going on and closed them out.
Absolutely DO NOT USE ALPACA IF YOU TRADE CRYPTO. This has happened multiple times, and there’s not a doubt in my mind that it will happen again with them. You will lose money in the long run if you plan to use them.