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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

#81

Post by nurettin »

srazzaque wrote: post #80
nurettin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Execution report is another thing that is different between the two. You can't even list your running orders without resorting to custom tags. You can't send multiple orders without providing their custom delimiters. You have to modify login messages and insert custom tags before a message is sent. The only uniformity I am left with is the fix template of key=value\0x01 repeating N times. Nobody conforms to fix 4.2 o…

I hear your pain... There's definitely brokers doing some strange things out there, or being overly sensitive to the order of fields. Let's not even talk about repeating groups. > custom delimiters Surely you mean custom _message_ delimiters, not field delimiters? In any case I think it's a foolish endeavour to think that if a broker says "we conform to FIX4.4" to ever take that at face value. Agree that the conforma…

Yes I meant repeating group delimiters. What I do like about fix clients (not fix protocol) is the extra value they provide by keeping your sessions alive, tolerating hot restarts, logging in and out on schedule and managing multiple sessions. Things you have to craft when building rest clients. Other than that, I see absolutely no difference between going through a conformance test and reading rest APIs. It is basically the broker's custom designed API under the guise of a so-called industry standard fix protocol.

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

#82

Post by phyalow »

nelaboras wrote: post #54
klohto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you’re not from US, what trading platforms do you use? I haven’t found any with free commissions and public APIs in the EU. Well, except for Interactive Brokers.

IB doesn't seem to be commission free though.

IBKR Lite is in the US, IBKR Pro in Aus etc is not.

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

#83

Post by supernova87a »

You should know in general, though, that no one trades "for free" despite what brokerages say.

Your order gets routed, delayed, placed differently, and while you may not immediately see it, your trades are getting a different result than if you explicitly paid a brokerage who charges a commission on it.

Learn about "payment for order flow".

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

#85

Post by srazzaque »

nurettin wrote: post #81
srazzaque wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear your pain... There's definitely brokers doing some strange things out there, or being overly sensitive to the order of fields. Let's not even talk about repeating groups. > custom delimiters Surely you mean custom _message_ delimiters, not field delimiters? In any case I think it's a foolish endeavour to think that if a broker says "we conform to FIX4.4" to ever take that at face value. Agree that the conforma…

Yes I meant repeating group delimiters. What I do like about fix clients (not fix protocol) is the extra value they provide by keeping your sessions alive, tolerating hot restarts, logging in and out on schedule and managing multiple sessions. Things you have to craft when building rest clients. Other than that, I see absolutely no difference between going through a conformance test and reading rest APIs. It is basic…

> What I do like about fix clients (not fix protocol) is the extra value they provide by keeping your sessions alive, tolerating hot restarts, logging in and out on schedule and managing multiple sessions.

I agree somewhat, but I think the protocol needed to come first. Can you honestly say that in its absence, multiple clients would be able to implement these behaviours in a uniform manner?

The fact that there's a concept of a "session" demarcated with LOGON/LOGOUT, sequence numbering, resend semantics, heartbeating - all this had to come from... somewhere.

Put another way: if you get 10 brokers developing their own REST/HTTP API's, what is the chance they'll normalise on a similar set of core concepts?

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

#86

Post by Slartie »

markvdb wrote: post #76
klohto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you’re not from US, what trading platforms do you use? I haven’t found any with free commissions and public APIs in the EU. Well, except for Interactive Brokers.

You probably won't ever see an EU broker offer free trades. The EU market is more regulated to avoid anything that smells of front running. There was a somewhat revealing interview by the people behind Flatex, a big discount broker from Germany [0]. Dutch source, do use a translator https://www.tijd.be/markten-live/nieuws/algemeen/nieuwe-eige... . "Is it easier for a pan European company to keep big US competition li…

And then fintech startups like Trade Republic or Just Trade came along and...offered basically free trades (the 1€ at TR can be considered almost non-existent when comparing to the 5-10€ even at discount brokers like Flatex).

They found a third way of financing themselves: just support one marketplace which kicks back some money to them on each trade, which they in turn earn from the spread between buy and sell prices.

I thought the US predecessors of this kind of broker (Robin Hood comes to my mind first) which is still pretty new in Europe would have basically the same business model - earning some money with each trade by scraping off a few cents (or a good bunch of cents for stocks with low liquidity) from the spread?

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

#87

Post by tom_mellior »

giorgioz wrote: post #57
bwood wrote: post #34

Alpaca is great! As far as brokerage APIs go, theirs is top notch and a breeze to code for. The founders are also really responsive and helpful. I know this because I wrote an app that connects to Alpaca accounts (as well as other brokerages) to help people build their own custom index funds [0]. It only took a few weeks to build our Alpaca integration, whereas other brokerages often take months/years just to get acc…

how does Alpaca make money?

They have a well-hidden FAQ section: https://support.alpaca.markets/hc/en-us/articles/36001104717...

They list several ways in which they "will" make money. My (possibly unkind) reading is that currently they're burning investor money.

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

#88

Post by voiper1 »

bwood wrote: post #34

Alpaca is great! As far as brokerage APIs go, theirs is top notch and a breeze to code for. The founders are also really responsive and helpful. I know this because I wrote an app that connects to Alpaca accounts (as well as other brokerages) to help people build their own custom index funds [0]. It only took a few weeks to build our Alpaca integration, whereas other brokerages often take months/years just to get acc…

For my own managed funds/indexes, I use https://m1finance.com, also with no fees.

You specify pies of funds with weights.

They automatically allocate funds and dividends to the underweight entries, and have 1 click for rebalancing.

It's not made for single-real time trading, there's one trading window each day.

Sure beats the spreadsheet and whole-share issues when I did it for free with Robinhood.

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

#89

Post by OJFord »

markvdb wrote: post #76
klohto wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you’re not from US, what trading platforms do you use? I haven’t found any with free commissions and public APIs in the EU. Well, except for Interactive Brokers.

You probably won't ever see an EU broker offer free trades. The EU market is more regulated to avoid anything that smells of front running. There was a somewhat revealing interview by the people behind Flatex, a big discount broker from Germany [0]. Dutch source, do use a translator https://www.tijd.be/markten-live/nieuws/algemeen/nieuwe-eige... . "Is it easier for a pan European company to keep big US competition li…

> You probably won't ever see an EU broker offer free trades.

Freetrade, Trading212, both registered in the UK. (And I don't think 'transition period' would make a difference, but they're both years older than that.)

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

#90

Post by smabie »

zelly wrote: post #56
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…

The proprietary API is guaranteed to be slower. The brokers must send order flow as FIX to the exchange. This adds latency of however long it takes the broker's software to translate to FIX. I don't think there are any successful quant strategies that don't rely on speed, so basically anything with a proprietary API is solely for amateurs.

I don't think you understand what quant finance is about. Almost all quant strategies don't rely on speed. In fact, HFT is usually considered a totally different space than investing (and therefore quant investing).
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