The alpaca api has a boolean for shortable and one for easy to borrow but as far as I can tell, these seem to mean the same thing. Is there a difference and/or which one should I be using if there isn’t a difference?
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I have the same question.
@Reto4 When opening a short position just look at the shortable attribute. That must be true. Currently, one of the requirements to be shortable is easy_to_borrow but that may change in the future.
If one already has a short position you may want to monitor the easy_to_borrow attribute. Alpaca doesn’t close an existing short position if it becomes not easy_to_borrow but the borrow rates may increase. Therefore, one may want to factor that into the decision to hold an existing short position.
There is a little more info on this in the documentation here.
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