Hi there,
I’m new to Alpaca APIs but excited to see everything been mature here to start an automated trading journey.
I have a question on the assets list on which I tend to narrow to a specific group(more precisely ETFs) to trade. Seems I can’t get all ETFs in a list from the provision APIs by reading their properties like this:
Asset({ ‘class’: ‘us_equity’,
‘easy_to_borrow’: True,
‘exchange’: ‘ARCA’,
‘fractionable’: True,
‘id’: ‘e9de9f1c-cc8f-4534-95ae-1d7f1d09a5dc’,
‘marginable’: True,
‘name’: ‘Invesco S&P 500 Pure Value ETF’,
‘shortable’: True,
‘status’: ‘active’,
‘symbol’: ‘RPV’,
‘tradable’: True})
Is that possible to get such list, or any practices in community before to construct such list by other tinkering? Thanks in advance if there are any clues.
IM
Hello,
GET /v2/assets to get the list of symbols: Assets | Alpaca Docs
And you probably need to maintain a list of ETFs.
Do you know which values are valid for asset_class? I would also like to find ETFs on Alpaca. Can I look for ISINs like “IE00B57X3V84”?
@bennycode
Do you know which values are valid for asset_class ?
Currently the valid asset classes are us_equity, us_option and crypto. There isn’t a direct way to find ETF assets.
Can I look for ISINs like “IE00B57X3V84”
Unfortunately, Alpaca doesn’t support search or display of assets by anything but ticker symbol or an internal asset_id. Why? ln a word ‘licensing’. The various identifiers such as ISINs and CUSIPs require a licensing fee to display.
However, that’s not the exact reason. For the typical retail traders an ISIN or CUSIP number isn’t easy to work with. Why? These numbers reference a specific securities offering, they do not reference, for example ‘the common stock issued by AAPL’. Many corporate actions change the underlying security while keeping the overarching symbol. Every time, for example, there is a reverse stock split a new security is issued with a new ISIN and CUSIP. The symbol remains the same but the ISIN and CUSIP change. Keeping track of all those changes and mappings can be a challenge.
Thanks for the detailed answer, as always. Knowing that ISIN and CUSIP can change, it makes more sense for the end user to have a symbol.
Since I can’t look up ISINs, can you tell me how to find the MSCI World ETF?
@bennycode To get the ticker symbol for “MSCI World ETF”, or any security for that matter, I personally just do a we search. You can usually get the symbol that way. In this case you will get to the iShares site which displays the symbol as USMV,
One can also download all the active us_equity assets using the API. Then search the name field for the asset. If one is looking up one or two assets it may be easiest to simply do a web search. If one has a number of assets to lookup, downloading the assets table and searching the name may work best.
