Short Sell Restriction

Hi,

Short-selling is not working on paper-account. I have balance 0 since more than a week. Is it same issue in real-account?

How to test short-sell algo with paper-trading?

There really isn’t anything ‘special’ one needs to do to ‘sell short’ a stock. Simply place a sell order for something which you currently don’t have. As an example, if you don’t own any TSLA stock, place an order to sell 10 shares of TSLA. That will submit an order to ‘short’ 10 shares of TSLA. This works in the API but, to test it out, an easy way is in place a sell order in the web portal. You should see a negative 10 shares show up in your positions indicating you hold ‘short’ 10 shares of TSLA.

Note that you cannot go from long to short in a single trade. One must first close out the long position with a sell order, then submit a second sell order to open a short position.

Could you explain the comment a bit more “I have balance 0 since more than a week. Is it same issue in real-account?”. Are you referring to account.equity? If so, that can be reset to any value (the default is $100,000) by clicking the small ‘reset’ icon in the top of the paper trading screen.

1 Like

thanks. but i was wondering why can’t we "go from long to short in a single trade. " ? this is so inconvenient. we have to always check if the “long to 0” orders filled or not before placing the short selling orders. and during next() function, this isn’t very obvious how to achieve, cause we might need to put this logic in notify_orders and check order status.

This only complicates things without any obvious benefit.