This morning the Alpaca platform experienced a total failure in order execution, both on the live and test sites. This is unacceptable for traders. I’m posting this so everyone has a record of it going forward. From my data, it seems to have lasted about 1/2 hour, during the most volatile period of the day.
These are the times where traders make their biggest gains. If Alpaca, or their execution company “have issues” during these periods, there is no point to any of it. What’s more concerning is that there has been no comment from anyone at Alpaca about what happened. Are you blocking trades during peaks in volatility? Was there a backbone issue? Are you hoping that you can just brush it under the rug and it will be forgotten? If anyone out there experienced what I did, please post a reply comment. And if Alpaca has a comment, please do the same. Thank You.
No response from support?
This is not the first failure which occurred today. Last week it was similar failure when execution seized for about an hour. If you get caught on the wrong side of the trade during times like this and can’t get out - you can get wiped out… Not good. I wish Alpaca would be more transparent.
No. Nothing. I just want potential future clients to see what’s actually happening here.
When did the outage happen and on what ticker? I was trading for most of the day and didn’t happen to have any outages. I did notice that alpaca stopped using the normal support email contact which is kind of frustrating
This was last Monday, 10/28. No orders were going through. Not even on their website. It looks like it was a problem with account balances being accurate so orders were denied.
I see. I have had the issue where the Day trading buying power was effected by overnight holds on leveraged ETF’s. If you held too many shares of a leveraged ETF overnight, then your day trading buying power could go to 0 which will restrict you from trading for that day. not sure if this was your case
I don’t hold anything overnight ever. 100% day trading. My Buying Power was not accurate so all my trades were being denied. It lasted about an hour, maybe a half hour…then everything was fine. It’s actually happening RIGHT NOW.
Im on the paper trading and cant do anything
I can’t close a position because its saying pending cancel
I’m able to trade fine and I was day trading all day (Even in the last few hours). Just curious, what assets were you guys trading? are they listed on the major exchanges?
Those orders you have listed are limit orders, You probably need to cancel the limit order before closing the open positions.
On the screenshot above all popular momo stocks. Stayed in pending_cancel for at least 30 min. Then cleared by itself. This is no good.
Market orders for AAPL were locked up…both buy and sell. Account balances not updating. But this is all on test platform.
The paper trading system can be finicky and I’ve definitely had problems with it but I cant recall ever having major outages on the live platform. Its frustrating that alpaca doesn’t have a direct customer support email anymore to contact them directly for questions like this.
So you’re saying that the live system is much more stable? I’ve been IAB for about 15 years and have been testing Alpaca for about 10 months, and I can’t take the break downs, and lock ups. It is unacceptable. I do like their API though. That’s why I WANT to believe in what they are doing.
I’ve been using the live API since January and the only problem I’ve had is a major screw up in my buying power as a result of a stock split not being settled. However, support sent me an email before the split, that I admittedly ignored, stating that the splits wont be settled until 3 business days so it was on me to update my trades accordingly. Aside from that I really haven’t had major issues that weren’t my fault. (Bear in mind I predominantly swing trade, only just recently started testing day trades a month ago). IBKR definitely is stiff competition but like you stated, alpaca’s API is just so much better. I can only imagine their services improving moving forward
Until today I was going to move a large chunk of my money to Alpaca. Now I’m hesitant. Would you risk allocating half of your life savings to Alpaca account? All brokers i know of have phone and email support except this one.
The lack of support is extremely troubling as they used to be very fast with response emails (Not sure why they got rid of it, they were always helpful). I have 20% of my portfolio with Alpaca. The rest is in other brokers that handle my long term investing. I keep this account for swing/day trading, not so much for long term investing. I’m not a financial planner/advisor so I can’t say what the best options are for you and your portfolio