Is it reasonable to get market data from elsewhere and just use alpaca for trade execution?

Getting Started with Alpaca
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I want to build my first trading bot this year. I tried to join the slack but the links are dead; if someone can share it or has recommendations on where to ask beginner questions in general I’d love to know. Forum formats are preferred but r/algotrading has strict limitations.

Getting to the question, is it common practice to get all data from outside alpaca, like yfinance or somewhere else, and then just use the alpaca api for trade execution? I suppose the problem will be the price could be slightly difference etc? Anything you can share on this would be helpful thank you.

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@wolfhat Here’s a link to join the Alpaca Community Slack workspace. This will expire in 30 days which may be why other links don’t work?

Either the Forums here or The Alpaca Community slack are good places for algo trading questions. Slack is a bit more interactive and has more followers.

As far as market data. The market data API packages which Alpaca offers (the free and the paid plans) are completely separate from the trading APIs. One can trade using Alpaca without subscribing to Alpaca data and, vice versa, one can subscribe to Alpaca market data and trade elsewhere.