Coincidentally I've also just released a command line client for Alpaca [0] written in Rust along with a library backing it [1].
Interesting timing :-)
Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
141–150 of 170 posts
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.)
>Freetrade Freetrade are now charging £3 a month for ISAs (tax free wrapped accounts) so it might be free but it's not completely free.
It also has fee-less non-ISA accounts (not tax free).
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Robin Hood is taking from the rich, giving to the poor, and then turning around and selling the poor out?
Selling order flow isn't "selling the poor out". Reg NMS literally requires brokerages to route your orders to where they will get the best execution price. In general you as a retail investor get better execution prices because of how this works (why? because retail investors generally don't have new information that will move the price so they are "safe" trades for liquidity providers). Now robin hood _did_ get fin…
Yeah, I misunderstood what "selling order flow" means; I was under impression this is something closer to front-running. Thanks for the link!
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#144What's really cool about Alpaca is the integration with zipline via pylivetrader. This means that you can take your backtested factor models and easily convert them to live trading. Also, they have pretty lax margin requirements. You can borrow 2x the cash you have, 4x for intraday if you're a pattern day trader, and the maintenance requirement is only 25%. And with zero commissions, suddenly it's possible for the av…
Do you have any reference on `legit factor stats`? I do not understand how leverage will be beneficial. Leverage will also multiply the potential downside risk after all? I would like to understand more how the trading cost would make up for it on average.
> I do not understand how leverage will be beneficial.
Same here, if I understood the grandparent they were saying you lose 0.04% on every trade (from spread) and "in a year" that is 10% (250 trades?).
If you have a strategy that has expected returns of x bips per trade then you make an expected x-4 and with leverage 4 * (x - 4). Both have the same "sign", so if x-4 is expected positive, leverage just makes it higher risk-reward.
In fact with leverage you also have to pay interest on the loan, which seems to be at least ~18 bips (or 3/4 of that since the returns are on 4 * cash and interest is on 3 * cash) for a single day loan (far exceeding the "spread cost"): https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/accounts_prod...
It seems the only way leverage would help is if there were fixed costs to trading (which I assume there are but the GP does not mention).
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#145(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…
I have implemented FIX for a living for a few years. It’s fragmented beyond belief. You can have different standards for different parts of the same brokerage. You have to do separate conformance tests for different asset classes at the same (big, well known, reputable) broker. The proprietary APIs like Bloomberg’s provide additional value rather than being alternatives to FIX. Make no mistake: you cannot interchange a FIX endpoint for another without making changes. The core problem is that you can impose arbitrary semantics on top of FIX messages. For example, a broker might require you to send timestamps in UTC for equities, and local time for FX, on the same FIX connection. Another might have a limit on the number of characters you can put in a ClOrdId - so GUIDs as ClOrdIds go out the window. Another big screw up is extensive use of non-ISO currency codes and the ambiguity of major and minor denomination. Is “GBp” pence? Sometimes yes! Sometimes not. Then - the most colossal screw up of them all - the reverse proxy people. They are companies that will convince management that they have a “network” and “access to liquidity”. It’s actually just a reverse proxy server that _manipulates messages in flight_! It sounds ideal, as if they will standardize your message flow so you don’t have to worry about broker specifics. In practice, it never works, and they opaquely mess with things you don’t want them to. Imagine sending an order denominated in cents, and the reverse proxy forwards it having changed the denomination to dollars. This really happened to me.
BTW, I love working on this stuff and swapping notes with other people. Drop me a line (email in profile) if you want to talk anything related to FIX!
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#146Earlier 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.
~17 USD/trade? Jesus christ that's high..
The joys of living in a small isolated country.
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#147(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…
I wrote a FIX engine in Common Lisp once, working for a Norwegian retail broker. Worked like a charm for many years, connected to multiple market places and brokerages. Adapting to new counterparties was certainly a bit of work, but generally far less than implementing their binary protocols. (We tried that too from time to time, usually if FIX was not an option from the exchange. Admittedly rare i later years.)
Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to open source it, and it’s now lost in the void after a takeover. :(
Good luck to you. It’s not an impossible project. :)
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#148FYI: "With no commission" is a bug, not a feature. Typically, when you pay commission, you get better prices. Let's say you buy 100 shares of SPY at Interactive Brokers. You pay $1 commission and get it for 268.28. At a free-of-commissions broker, you might get your 100 shares for 268.30. That's $1 more than the trade at IB. TNSTAAFL. It's exactly like how duck typing took over programming in the last decade or so wi…
Do you have any sources that retail trades are being front run? When I looked into it a while back it seemed they would sell your order flow but you had to be guaranteed best execution prices.
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#149This makes me wonder if there are any old school, ASCII or DOS era stock trading games out there..
Re: Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that alpaca charges a commission on trades by inflating the price and taking a cut? Or through what mechanism do commissioned trades get lower prices?
Free brokerages generally don’t execute orders as quickly in order to sell order flow which allows HFT firms to front-run your trade. If you’re a buy and hold investor, the fractions of a cent you’re losing don’t matter much over the long run but the issue is still there. Generally when you pay for something, it means that somebody is beholden to you if there’s issues. Robinhood et. al. are free because they suck. ht…
I'm going to have to jump in here and say, no, HFT can and does not front-run your trade. There are reasons why your execution on RH is not as good as professionals, but it's not because of front-running.