Live Trading

Automated trading is powerful, read below to understand how to interpret messages and trade successfully

Once you have successfully connected your Alpaca account, you're ready to start trading live! Remember, trading is a risky activity, but we like to think that you're in good company.

In order to execute trades live in your account, you must be following at least one strategy.

Your trading experience will be slightly different based on your notification preferences. The first thing you should do is head over to the discord server and type /soci notifications and reply with Automation. Here, you will be able to control your automated trading preferences. Confirmation messages are turned ON by default, which means you will need to authorize every trade from sms or discord before they are placed. You can turn this OFF at any time by typing STOP

How do I receive trade alerts?

You will still receive trade alerts via your notification preferences of choice, sms or discord. You can always change this by typing /soci notifications and reply with notifications inside discord.

Receiving trade notifications via email is no longer supported. If you had email turned on, your settings have been replaced with sms.

Live Trading: Trade confirmations: ON

If trade confirmations are turned on, you'll be required to confirm every trade before it is placed in your Alpaca account. For this example, we're going to demonstrate what that looks like through Discord, but the experience is the exact same through sms.

In every case, you will be required to reply back with Yes + random code that is generated. Our APIs will receive the notification, attempt to place the trade in you Alpaca account and return a success message if the trade was placed successfully. If an error was encountered you will receive feedback on the same. More on error messages later.

Example of a successful trade executed through Discord

Now head over to your Alpaca account to view your order history. Remember, that trades are always relative and based off total equity and buying power. Notice the timestamp in the Discord message also matches the timestamp in Alpaca - our engines are built for real-time applications so you can be sure that every trade will be executed timely.

Alpaca order history table was updated in real-time after a trade was authorized through Discord

Remember that you have 2 minutes to respond with "Yes" + the random code to execute your trade.

Live Trading: Trade confirmations: OFF

Live trading works in a similar way with the removal of the intermediary step of confirmation trades. With trading confirmations turned off, all trades will be mirrored automatically without your approval. You will still, however, receive notifications when trades are placed in your account.

Turn trade confirmations off when you are most comfortable with the strategy you are following. We suggest giving it a few weeks before you initiate this step to safe guard you from risky trading activity.

Pt1: Successfully placing a trade with Discord when trade confirmations are turned off

Since automated trading does not involve an intermediary confirmation step, orders are set to Alpaca directly without the need for confirmation.

Pt2: Successfully placing a trade with Discord when trade confirmations are turned off

And that's it for now...

We understand that there are many edge cases that need to be accounted for when it comes to automated trading, and we've done our best to design the product around the majority of traders and investors out there. If you find a bug, please report it as soon as you can.

How we handle replaced orders? You will notice the same behaviour for Replaced orders. Sofia will send you a notification via sms or Discord to confirm replacing the trade.

How we handle cancelled orders? Cancelled orders never require confirmation. We see this as a change of behaviour in the strategy, and have decided to cancel all orders automatically, without regard of the trade confirmation status in your account.

Happy trading! ✌️