Support for fractional shares

you meant non-legitimate

Checking in again. Is there any update to this request? Is work on providing access to fractional share purchase still ongoing? Or has it become a deprecated effort?

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Also checking in again. This is the make or break for me using Alpaca vs another system, and I assume there are a number of other investors with similar preference sets. Any official update from Alpaca?

I would love to see this feature.

Low-priority feature. Adds complexity, attracts non-serious users. Many higher-priority things for Alpaca eng to work on – including features other brokerages do not offer.

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I can see the benefit for those wanting to properly balance/re-balance portfolios of all account sizes. This is optimal in Friends & Family accounts, like IB has, or even financial advisors who have some smaller accounts. If you create an algo that can generate long signals on 20 stocks, say SPY’s top 20, then an account is mandated to have around a 10k minimum to even get a position of AMZN/GOOG along with equally weighting smaller prices, like AAPL at 132.
Having these small accounts often leads to other, bigger accounts. The FA’s with the most AUM I know are always willing to take on small accounts for this purpose.

@clumma I disagree that it attracts non-serious traders. I agree Alpaca can’t be building features for every 1k account that comes on-board, but I don’t often find API capable traders who don’t have the technical sophistication to be serious; just that they may still be working to accumulate wealth.

Here is Alpaca’s own outreach regarding hedge funds and why Alpaca is beneficial for them. It isn’t often someone is a fully registered hedge fund from day 1. A common process to becoming a fund is:

  1. Personal success ->
  2. Small family/friends success ->
  3. Financial advisor success ->
  4. Dedication to a full hedge fund

This is what IB has in place for the up-and-comers. Steps 1 & 2 require the usage of smaller accounts.
P.S. is there a forum/way for Family & Friends accounts? I see the closed ticket for multiple sub-accounts for paper trading, but nothing explicit on a master account.

We’ve certainly listened. Fractional shares have been on Alpaca’s list for awhile now and fit’s into our mission of ‘democratizing trading’ by allowing more diversification options for individuals with smaller accounts. Alpaca hasn’t set an official date for launching fractional shares, but shooting for first quarter 2021. Not all shares will be ‘fraction share’ tradable just a subset of approximately 500 securities to begin with.

Stay tuned.

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In my Alpaca account I currently hold 53 names in 5 subportfolios, each of which I rebalance weekly. Among the 53 names are 17 ETPs with AUMs ranging from $1T down to $140M. The stocks have market caps ranging from $500B down to $75M. Two of the stocks are ADRs. I have broad sector exposure. I have over a dozen names with $500 target positions currently. Trading in whole shares has never been an issue in this account.

But you’re probably right: it will not attract non-serious traders since they are already at other brokerages.

Alpaca should spend its development resources (and complexity budget) on features that make it unique. There are more than a few features it could build, which NO other brokerage currently offers, which would be FAR more useful to traders of all stripes than fractional shares.

I wrote:

features it could build, which NO other brokerage currently offers, which would be FAR more useful to traders of all stripes than fractional shares

Just to give some examples:

  • It could fix the margin bugs I’ve encountered. I’m sure there are more.
  • It could add subportfolio tracking so I don’t have to do it in Excel.
  • It could implement real time-weighted and IRR return tracking, per subportfolio and even per name.
  • It could display other portfolio metrics, such as Sharpe ratios and CAPM statistics.

I think you misinterpreted the AUM I was referencing. I was saying the legitimate size of someone’s account, not the AUM of the funds being traded.
Example: I trade for family and friends. Many are MD residents with $10,000 in their accounts. So their accounts are small today, but in 1-2 years their accounts will be larger. Right now, if I try to equal weight/rebalance a long signal on 20 individual stocks I can only send 5% of my cash to each position. 10k * 5% = $500 max price per position. I can’t even buy 1 whole share of AMZN.
Fractional shares solves that, which Dan alluded to. Thanks Dan.

I’m in agreement that major bugs for margin take priority.
As for the other metrics, they all exist in Python.
Pyfolio has a bulk of these metrics: rolling portfolio beta, volatility, sharpe, underwater, drawdowns, cum alpha, beta, tail-ratio, skew, kurtosis, etc…

No, I understood. I was just trying to illustrate that my account is small and holds a wide variety of securities, and has no problem with whole shares. For an even smaller account like the one you mention, one would be well advised to hold an ETF instead.

The features I mentioned all require nontrivial software engineering. So no, they don’t just “exist” in any library, including Pyfolio.

I would love this +1

+1 I would like fractional shares as well.

Schwab also offers fractional shares (they call them ‘share slices’). By staying behind, Alpaca loses business and clients.

Any update on it? Is it still in line for this quarter?

Any Updates? Really looking forward to this feature.

++1 for this! It would be a great feature, also adding more markets would be great too.

It’s currently in beta.

just a general question on fraction shares, for the trading fees (REG and TAF) how would those work with fractional shares? My understanding is they are something like $0.000015 per share. Can i assume with fractional shares it would be half if I bought half a share?

Fractional trading announced - but not working!

support for fractional shares was announced at How to Place an Order Using the Fractional Shares API?

however this doesn’t work yet.

when submitting a request for notional the response is:
{
“code”: 40010001,
“message”: “qty is required”
}

when submitting a request with a fraction as qty the response is:
{
“code”: 40010001,
“message”: “qty must be integer”
}

when exactly will this feature be enabled?

endpoint:
https://paper-api.alpaca.markets/v2/orders