How Are The Spreads Here?

Alpaca Account Troubleshooting
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I have not opened an account yet. I’ve used IB in the past and they have low commissions and tight spreads. It’s great that Alpaca has commission-free trading. I had a couple of free brokerages 20 years ago but other brokers bought them out to kill off that competition. I think they were named BrokerageAmerica and FreeTrade, but it’s been so long I’m not sure. Anyway, I hope that doesn’t happen to Alpaca.

So my question is does Alpaca’s API result in tight spreads or do they make up for their commission free trades by taking something on the bid/ask spread? I apologize if my skepticism offends anyone.

Thanks, Steve

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I haven’t successfully operated an algo through alpaca yet, but have toyed around with the API and paper trading. It looks like all execution occurs at IEX, with pretty tight spreads. I didn’t notice any meaningful difference vs IB on most [liquid] ETFs - all were $0.01 or $0.02. Of course, this will be much worse on anything less liquid, but you’d probably want to compute a limit order for anything else anyway.

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Alpha_Hound

Thanks for the reply. That’s basically what I wanted to know.

Steve

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