Positions/Portfolio Current Price/PL Not Updating/Accurate

[Philip_Isles]

Environment

Language
Python/Ubuntu

Alpaca SDK Version
NA

Other Environment Details
NA

Problem

Summary
I am seeing consistent issues where the PL values for my held positions are not updating.

• Sometimes the current price/PL values for my positions do not update for hours or days, if at all.
• Resetting Paper account does not resolve the issue.
• This of course affects my overall portfolio PL values as well.

The current price of any position I hold is not correct.

*I have confirmed this by visually checking the price and/or getting market data from other Alpaca Market Data APIs.

• I have also confirmed it by placing orders at the correct current price that go through.

As you can see from my screenshot the Price column does not reflect the actual price of the asset.

When I pull the current price from other Alpaca API sources other than get positions, the current price is accurate.

Is this a known issue? Can someone give me detail as to how often these values should be updating or if there is something I can do to fix it?

I have a lot of programming that makes decision off PL values–both my positions and overall portfolio value–and if this is not going to change I would like to know so I can refactor my code to look at the current price from another source.

Paper or Live Trading?
Paper

As you can see from my screenshot the Price column does not reflect the actual price of the asset.

[Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca]

@Philip_Isles You asked about portfolio positions not seeming to update. I agree it’s a bit confusing but there is a reason why the ‘price’ values don’t seem to align.

I took a few scree shots below to better highlight the issue. First, note the price in the chart shown below is $87.231.90. That is the mid-point price between the bid and ask. Also note if one clicks on the “i” when placing a trade you see a popup with the last price, bid, and ask. The last price in this case is $87,266.556. Because of the large spreads in crypto and sometimes infrequent trades, the mid-point price is often a more indicative ‘price’ and is why it’s shown on the chart.

Now look at the positions screen. The position price is shown as the last price (ie $87,266.56). This is shown because it aligns with the convention for equity positions to simply reflect the last traded prices.

So, confusing maybe, but the use case for the prices are slightly different so display different values.