I just started testing my algorithm with this service for the first time 3 days ago, and I am having a terrible experience with this platform.
Every morning for the first 20-30 min no orders will fill, I can’t sell or buy any stocks. Sometimes my market orders will go through during this period and execute at prices the stocks hasn’t even been at in weeks. This is unacceptable and if this transfers to live trading then alpaca either needs to fix this issue or they will be seeing a lot of lawsuits I’m sure/ Either way I am moving away from this platform until they get their shit together.
I don’t know what happened 3 days ago, but paper trading has been unusable since then. It used to work ok before that. Is there a more official reporting system than this forum, which it looks like no one from Alpaca reads (?)
Join the Alpaca Slack, I did earlier today and they reply quickly there. This problem (orders hanging in the morning) has also been affecting live trading accounts and causing people to lose money.
That really scares me, honestly. I was trying the service. There is no problem, in my opinion, in having issues. It happens. I just don’t understand the lack of communication.
I’ll try to join the Alpaca Slack, thank you @urania.
We have had some issues in paper the past few days. We are going to put more effort into paper going forward. We will be actively monitoring orders not filling, pending cancel, pending replace, accepted orders in addition to corporate action processing in paper.
Thanks for this reply and the work. I’m sure you know how important this is; can’t justify switching to live if I can’t reliably execute and properly test strategies in paper. And if these issues exist in live, that’s scary.