I assume that Alpaca follows the NMS regulation, hence when I place a Market order, it should be traded based on SIP data (NBBO).
But as far as I see, the API offers no possiblity of checking the current quote (SIP) of a symbol, before placing a Market order, unless I pay 100 USD/month for a subscription?
Hence the only possiblity I have with a free plan is to go and manualy check the current quote (SIP) through the GUI? I must be not seeing something?
Go for another data source, e.g. via IBKR or eod historical data. It is much cheaper.
Thanks @Carlos_Santana for confirming that I am not overlooking something.
As is now, free subscription API can only be used for “blind” trading, while the GUI doesn’t have this limitation. I thought Alpaca was all about the API, and not so much the GUI?
If someone from Alpaca is actually reading these posts, then consider this a feature request. Free subscription is already limited to 200 requests/minute. Exposing SIP data on e.g. /snapshot endpoint would make the free subscription plan usable (at least for some real testing) while still remaining limited.
You can of course query non sip data (it is from IEX) via the API: StockBarsRequest