A lot of commission free brokers limit the number of orders allowed within a day. Does alpaca have such restrictions?
Alpaca doesn’t place any limits to the number of orders which can be placed during a day. However, there is a limit of 200 API calls per minute.
Assuming 390 minutes in a trading day, that places a theoretical upper limit of 200 x 390 or 78,000 orders in a day. Realistically, however, because one doesn’t trade uniformly over the day and there typically are other API calls to fetch buying power, update orders, get market data, etc. maybe 5000 orders per day would seem reasonable. Another thing to consider is some order types, such as a ‘bracket order’, place both the open and close orders with a single API call.
With all that said, most user trading strategies are not realistically constrained to the number of orders which can be placed in a day.
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Thank you Dan, very helpful response.