Troubles with paper account - incorrect equity reported

Hi!
We are using python/lean to test some of our algos and Alpaca as a broker.

We are experiencing huge troubles with paper accounts in recent days.

  1. Wrong equity, buying power
    we have open a fresh paper account with $1M (and $4M buying power), we made some trades yesterday (at peak our stock portfolio was worth 900k), and our equity was at 1.001M (+1k) at the end of the day with ~700k invested in stocks as we closed 4 position. Now, before market open equity suddenly jumped to 1.7M and our buying power was scaled back to $1M.

it happened also on Friday (Jan 29) and yesterday (Feb 1) - we decided then to reset equity and start from scratch, but we can’t do it all the time.

our paper account number is 3FE00C0E.

  1. no charges for short position

we also tried to just check how in practice you charge for short position. We shorted 100 NVDA on Jan 28 and bought it back next day - no charges was applied. Also it seems that no real margin interest is charged even if you use margin trading. Are those two costs not simulated on paper accounts?

Thank you in advance for any insights on paper accounts stability.

Regards,
jd

2 Likes

yep had the same also, buying power is wrong, reset again last night, for today. Only bought 70 stocks and it buying power has been reduced to 644. it should be 245k. Will have to reset again… something is for sure amiss at the moment.

1 Like

sounds like your not updating your api keys when you do a reset

I did reset API key. Aforementioned situation occured next day after equity/API reset, i.e. just after reset it was OK, but on next day equity was reported as $1M cash + total equity value.

I’m having this exact same issue. I can’t track daily P/L effectively because my balance resets to zero every night, since January 28th. The only day this hasn’t happened is 2/8, for some reason.

1 Like

anyone solve this issue?

Same issue, my asset value jumps up and down without any deposit/withdrawals. This is a live account

2 Likes

the same happens to me…

Please can you send a message to support@alpaca.markets?

I assumed the problem was isolated to paper accounts. How often does this happen and how long does it take to be corrected?

I’ve never seen this one before. The paper account shows me buying at 6:07 (Arizona time). How is that possible?

[SOXS] / Market BUY01/23/2023 06:07 AM / 36 / $27.43 / $987.48 / Filled

My trade robot doesn’t even wake up until 7:30 AM (Arizona time)!!

@Mike_Yantis I can maybe see what happened. Do you have an order ID. I’ll track it down.