I tried to buy a call option that is set to expire in a few minutes, but I got the message “contract X expires soon, unable to open new positions”. Questions:
@lks You asked a few questions
At what time is Alpaca disabling the buying of calls for options expiring the same day?
Standard equity options stop trading at 3PM EST. Broad based ETF options (eg SPY, QQQ) stop trading at 3:15PM EST.
Why even disable the feature? Are there plans to disable this limitation?
These restrictions are in place to allow for the review and possible sellout of expiring contracts to prevent an account from being auto-exercised or assigned and the account then being overbought or oversold. There’s no definitive plans to change this currently, but it is possible we may extend the cutoff time to be closer to the market close.