Troubles with paper account - incorrect equity reported

Alpaca Account Troubleshooting
#1

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

1 Like
#2

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.

#3

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

#4

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.

#5

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.