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Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

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Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#41

Post by teruakohatu »

phyalow wrote: post #36
teruakohatu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have subscribed to your channel. Do you know of any services that allow non US residents to join? I am in New Zealand.

NZ doesnt have much going for it in terms of access to international equities. If you have over $10k USD, you can get an interactive brokers account, their API is a bit rubbish and commissions are normally around $6.00 USD flat. Otherwise Direct Broking via Jardens, commissions are c. $30 NZD per trade. Sharesies are apparently launching international equities later in the year, but they dont offer API access.

Thanks for the response. I was hoping for API access. It is a pity that companies don't expand here when they open an AU branch. That said, I don't blame them as our regulators are very inflexible, I used to love ipredict until it was shutdown.

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#42

Post by fibers »

optymizer wrote: post #35
fibers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as everyone has said in the child comments the best way to do it is by buying feed access. on the other hand i am working through IEX data on a historical basis to backtest strategies

Thanks, I looked briefly at IEX. Seems like a good source of historical data (maybe real-time as well). One thing that caught my attention was their use of SSE - I typically see WebSockets-based APIs. I also noticed the free account gets 50K messages, which sounded like a lot, but it turned out it was just enough to set up one alert on the account - somewhat underwhelming, but I understand they'd like to convert the…

the best part about iex is that they give you milisecond historical data but on the other hand the data is only limited to their exchange so it clearly doesn't represent every exchange.

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#43

Post by LethargicStud »

My main FUD with alpaca.markets is the ability to transfer assets in/out. It doesn't look like they offer ACATS transfers (although there's not much info on this!).

Using them for anything beyond entertainment budget is very scary - you may incur substantial tax liability if e.g. they ever go out of business or you choose to use a different brokerage.

Any insight here? Am I missing something? Is there any way to transfer holdings out without incurring the cap gains?

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#44

Post by phyalow »

teruakohatu wrote: post #41
phyalow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NZ doesnt have much going for it in terms of access to international equities. If you have over $10k USD, you can get an interactive brokers account, their API is a bit rubbish and commissions are normally around $6.00 USD flat. Otherwise Direct Broking via Jardens, commissions are c. $30 NZD per trade. Sharesies are apparently launching international equities later in the year, but they dont offer API access.

Thanks for the response. I was hoping for API access. It is a pity that companies don't expand here when they open an AU branch. That said, I don't blame them as our regulators are very inflexible, I used to love ipredict until it was shutdown.

Yeah, simply put New Zealand is far too small of an addressable market to really warrant much attention.

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#45

Post by srazzaque »

(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.)

This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing.

The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching costs and lock-in (looking at you, Reuters and Bloomberg).

On the one hand, retail brokers need to support popular programming languages and paradigms to gain traction. So, they are releasing http-based APIs, or popular language-specific libraries/bindings for their proprietary APIs. But, they are doing this instead of pushing well-publicised battle-tested standards such as FIX[1], that would normalise the playing field across brokers. So my gut feel is that they are banking on users coding against their APIs and having some lock-in effects. Notable exception is that any broker that supports cTrader will have a FIX API, because cTrader provides that for them.

The problem is: if I write a bunch of code to work against Alpaca, TD Ameritrade, or whoever, that code will likely need to be revisited for some other broker like Robinhood. Granted, market connectivity code _should_ be well abstracted from my model if I'm following good design principles. But at least with FIX, the core concepts, fields, and messages remain the same across most FIX endpoints (NOS, ExecRpt, etc), allowing for a more uniform code holistically.

[1] https://www.fixtrading.org

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#47

Post by ciarannolan »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #37

Ok, but what's going to be your business model if you don't charge commission?

Who is this question directed at? OP is linking free software.

If you mean brokerages that advertise no fees to trade, they make money by loaning the cash in customers' accounts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/brokers-p...

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#48

Post by Random_ernest »

srazzaque wrote: post #45

(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…

Probably not the question you had in mind, but what Lisp and what made you choose it?

Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission

#50

Post by srazzaque »

Random_ernest wrote: post #48
srazzaque wrote: post #45

(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.) This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing. The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching…

Probably not the question you had in mind, but what Lisp and what made you choose it?

Common Lisp on SBCL.

I lived on the JVM for quite some time (and still do), and I wanted to explore other ecosystems out of sheer curiosity. Got to playing with Lisp/SBCL, some initial tests showed it was pretty quick, and was impressed that I could disassemble functions in the REPL and iterate rapidly. Then a while later... I noticed there wasn't a FIX library at around the same time I was exploring creating my own trading models.

So I can't say there was a lot of analysis across the different Lisps, etc. Had the coin flipped a little differently a while back this might have been in Racket. Also the choice of language in the book Professional Automated Trading[1] did influence me somewhat.

[1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Professional+Automated+Trading%3...

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