Insufficient balance for placing order

Hello everyone,

I am new to Alpaca Brokerage, I am currently using the Paper account and working on Python to implement buy and sell requests. I have managed to buy and sell one trade. But I am now wanting to buy again, but it is saying “Insufficient balance for BTC (requested: 1, available:0)”.
Can anyone please help me fix this issue? So I can continue trading.
Thank you!!

@JoeJollz What was the original starting equity? Was it the standard $100,000 USD? What were the two specific orders you placed? What is the order you are trying to place which is giving you the error. That would help troubleshoot.

Hiya @Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca , seems to be working fine today… just placed a a few orders on BTC and managed to close them. They were just regular market orders using BUY and SELL.

However, I discovered a new issue. When I place a BUY market order on BTC with qty=1, it goes through. But then when I try and close the position with a SELL market order, apparently the qty of BTC I own has now become 0.997499998… which surely isn’t right? So to close the position I then have to make a SELL market order using qty=0.997499998. I will attach a SS of the error message.

My bad, trading symbol=“BTC/USD”.

@JoeJollz Did you get this resolved? I’m having the same issue. It seems the symbol “BTC/USD” was improperly split as “BTC” and “USD”.

@Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca I’m using from alpaca.trading.requests import *. My query is trading_client.replace_order_by_id(order_id=uuid, order_data=ReplaceOrderRequest(limit_price=price)) and this only appears on SELL order for cryptos when updating the price. Would you help point out the issue and how to fix?

@rock Hiya, if you are referring to my first issue, about only not being able to buy again. That issue solved itself after I left it 24 hours, also, I could buy and sell repeated over a short period of time (<1 hours) and had no more issues.

My second issue is when I place a long position of qty=1, and then when I would like to close this position it claims I only own qty=0.997499998, so to close the position I had to edit the qty before I used ‘SELL’.

@rock can you elaborate more on improperly split as “BTC” and “USD”, I am still new to programming and using Alpaca documentation.