Orders are showing PENDING CANCEL

I am about to start live with Alpaca, but I am concerned that this issue is present in their LIVE platform and not just in Paper Trading. How often do you see this issue in the Live platform?

And Alpaca support doesnt offer much info about the root cause and if this issue has been addressed already

It’s only happened to my live account once in six active months of live trading

ok thanks, I will start live then…fingers crossed not to find any tech issues

Same issue and its a deal breaker, because a new order for the shares can’t be placed because there are not enough shares. This bug could obviously destroy an accounts value.

Hi @Brian_Rowe - this issue from 2020 has been resolved.

Do you want to give me some more details on what you’re seeing? Are you using the Paper or Live API?

It paper. you try to cancel the order… and instead of cancelling it sends pending cancel - for hours. That’s a deal breaker

Same here today. Live account. Pending canceled orders prevent me from placing new orders to sell my owned stocks.

I’m still seeing these regularly in Paper trading. I can’t feel good about going live yet with alpaca.

Brian, if it makes you feel better, I see it often on Paper, but never seen it yet on Live, and I do trade almost every day

Worth noting I am experiencing this as well in paper account, but it’s necessary to test this integration properly. I can’t just go live and cross my fingers, and I see some reports of this happening on people’s live accounts.

I agree with you, I reported the issue to Alpaca and they told me they were migrating to a new OMS system, and I have noticed an improvement on the last 10 days, I haven’t see anymore PENDING_CANCEL messages and my algos trade on 15s timeframe, so I generate a bunch of orders per day. There is no other way to cancel an order

My paper account has a pending_cancel order for 4 days already, not able to sell the positions. This would be scary when happening to a live account. Alpaca is so convenient, but without stability, it’s nothing.

It happen with my live money account. Can’t get a response from alpaca.

Guys my live trading account is also showing Pending Cancellation for Crypto. My Margin is blocked.

@Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca or other Alpaca team members, looks like this has been an issue for over a year now and I’m still seeing this issue (in paper at least) on nearly a daily basis myself. Can you give us an ETA on when we should expect this to be fixed? Having to wait for indeterminate pending_cancels is killing a lot of folks 'ability to test strategies, and it also sounds like others are experiencing this in live, which is a death sentence.

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I have tweeted @AlpacaHQ about this issue. Here is the link to my tweet. Perhaps if many of us in the community reply to that tweet and ask for a fix there, someone at Alpaca support may pick it up.

There are three general situations where one will see a status of pending cancel for an order. I’ll detail those, but first, canceling (ie deleting) an order is in all cases simply a request to cancel an order. To verify an order has actually been cancelled the order status should subsequently be checked and will typically be pending cancel, cancelled or filled (if the order could not be cancelled). It’s not uncommon for an order to be in a pending cancel state for seconds or minutes or longer.

The primary reason one sees pending cancel orders is when an order is cancelled during non-market hours. Alpaca forwards the request to the execution partner who has the order, but many of these partners only accept orders and cancelations during market hours or at most limited hours. Orders cancelled after market hours therefore often remain in a pending cancel state until the following market open.

A second reason for pending cancel orders is simply because some orders cannot be canceled.There isn’t a state of not cancelled (unfortunately) so these orders simply stay as pending cancel until they fill or expire. An example is NASDAQ orders being executed at open. If within a few minutes before open these orders cannot be cancelled. One could see orders with pending cancel for minutes, or longer, in this case.

There are however times which an order fails to get updated. They may have been in a pending cancel state and then either filled or expired but the status simply wasn’t updated. This isn’t normal behavior but can happen for example as a result of a system outage. These orders need to be researched for actual state and manually updated.

As with all account or order specific issues an email to support@alpaca.markets will get it resolved. If there are orders which you feel are ‘stuck’ in pending cancel simply send our support team a request to look into them. They will resolve the issue in a timely manner.

I only trade during business hours on paper , so the only cause for pending_cancel status for orders is the third one you describe, which I have been able to verify as failure to be updated, this causes an issue on strategies being unable to trade

On paper I havent seen the issue so far

Dan Whitnable, thanks for that explanation in your response. As you can see from the numerous messages in the thread many are facing a real problem with live trading and pending cancel. I hope Alpaca solves this.