Just today I found out the hard way that my account is margin, so when is Alpaca going to offer cash accounts?

Getting Started with Alpaca
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I opened a trading account with Alpaca and funded it with a small amount just to test day trading. My goal was to see if Alpaca execution is good and see if the Tradingview integration is good. Also, full pre-market trading is a great plus.

To my surprise, today I found out the account was margin when I was blocked from selling a winning position. I traded LYT 3 times and on the forth, profitable trade, I was hit with Pattern day trading restriction.

My winning position turned from a win to a loss and continuing.

Long story short when is Alpaca going to offer cash accounts? And is it possible to make the type of account being opened abundantly clear in the online application. Unless I missed it, I can’t remember seeing anything about margin.

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@abdul10000 No date for when Alpaca will offer cash accounts. Within the next few months, however, Alpaca will begin offering Tax Deferred (eg IRA) accounts which are ‘cash accounts’ behind the scenes so I’d imagine they will be coming after that. All current Alpaca accounts being margin accounts is stated in the account Terms & Conditions and also here in the docs among other places. I do agree though that it isn’t ‘front and center’ and I’ve brought this to the attention of the UI team. Much of this will be changing soon with the new taxed deferred account offering where one would need to explicitly select the account type.

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