Hi there! I have recently started developing with the Alpaca API, and I am testing code to place paper orders. During the development phase there is a lot of trial and error, testing of failure modes, etc. It would be REALLY helpful if we could opt out of PDT protection for paper trades. I triggered it today, and now I have to wait a week in order to continue testing, and it is killing me.
My actual algorithm should work without triggering PDT protection when trading live, but at this rate I’ll never get to the point of running it live if I have to wait a week in between every development cycle.
I am at the point that I am considering just dumping $25K into my account from my savings just to get around it. For a hobbyist, this a big deal though. A simple switch that allowed us to opt out for paper trades would be huge. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that PDT protection is applied to paper accounts, it’s useful in itself for testing purposes, but please please please let us temporarily disable it while we’re testing.
Thanks!