Alpaca

Alpaca is the quickest way to a working setup: free paper trading, US equities and options, REST order entry and a streaming execution feed. Your first paper trade walks through it end to end.

What it covers

Order entry	REST
Executions	Alpaca’s trade-updates stream: fills, partial fills, cancels, rejects
Instruments	US equities and ETFs; US equity options for the underlyings you choose
Catalog	Broker connections → Instrument universe in the cockpit
Prices	Not from Alpaca — see Limits

Credentials

Create a broker connection with Alpaca as the venue; its credentials drawer opens with these fields:

Field	What it is	Where to get it
API key ID	Identifies your key; starts with PK for paper, AK for live	The API Keys panel on your paper or live dashboard
Secret key	The key’s secret	Shown once, when you generate the key; if you lost it, generate a new key

Paper and live accounts have separate keys.

Enter them in the cockpit under Broker connections → alpaca-paper → Credentials (Test, then Save). They are stored encrypted with your master key, never in a file. Apply them to a running server without a restart:

export OMS_ADMIN=$(sed -n 's/^admin_password = "\(.*\)"/\1/p' ~/.config/oms/oms.toml)

curl -s -X POST localhost:3001/admin/connections/reload -H "Authorization: Bearer $OMS_ADMIN"

alpaca-paper should report Registered.

Paper or live

ALPACA_ENV chooses which Alpaca connection the OMS uses: PAPER (the default) or LIVE. The connection is named after it — alpaca-paper or alpaca-live — and holds that environment’s keys.

ALPACA_ENV=LIVE

Loading instruments

Saving the credentials offers to load Alpaca’s instrument universe — every tradable US equity and ETF it lists, about 14,400 — as a background job that takes a few seconds. After that, the Instrument universe column on Broker connections shows its state (○ Not loaded, ◐ Loading, ● Loaded, ◑ Partial, ✕ Failed) with Load, Reload, Load again or Retry. Jobs in the top bar has each load’s progress and log.

At startup, a connection with credentials whose instruments were never loaded gets a load automatically; OMS_SYNC_ON_BOOT=never turns that off.

From a terminal, the same load is:

oms setup sync-broker --broker alpaca --no-enrich

Option chains are not part of the universe. To seed chains for particular underlyings from the terminal: oms setup sync-broker --broker alpaca --underlyings SPY,QQQ --no-enrich.

FIGI enrichment through OpenFIGI is a separate job, POST /admin/broker-connections/alpaca-paper/universe/enrich — slow without an OPENFIGI_API_KEY.

Accounts

An OMS account points at a broker connection. For Alpaca, external_account_ref can be any label for the Alpaca account — it must be unique per connection:

{"code":"alpaca-paper-main","broker_connection_code":"alpaca-paper","external_account_ref":"paper","status":"ACTIVE"}

Limits

• No live equity prices. The OMS has no equity price feed, so equity and ETF positions are not marked to market. Option positions can be marked through Databento OPRA.
• A handful of Alpaca assets on exchanges the OMS has no venue code for (for example TXSE) are skipped during sync, with a warning naming them.
• Market orders outside US market hours wait at Alpaca for the open (day) — they show routed until then.