In simple English
This library lets Python programmers talk to the Alpaca trading service. You can place stock trades, buy crypto and stream live prices with simple code. It handles account management and checks your requests before sending them. You need an Alpaca account and API keys to use it. The software is free to download and open source.
What it is
A Python software development kit (a collection of code tools that help programmers build software using a specific service) that wraps the Alpaca brokerage and market data interfaces. It provides structured classes for submitting orders, querying historical bars and managing brokerage accounts.
What it is good for
Solo builders who want to write automated trading bots, pull historical stock data into pandas dataframes or build custom investment applications.
- Official support from Alpaca with regular updates.
- Built-in data validation using pydantic (a way to check that data matches expected rules before your code runs).
- Comprehensive examples for stocks, crypto and options trading.
- Requires an active Alpaca brokerage account and valid API keys.
- API changes by the platform can break existing trading scripts.
- Numerous separate client classes require careful reading of the documentation.
Writing raw HTTP requests to the Alpaca API or using the older deprecated SDK
pandas
- jesse-ai/jesse8.7k stars
A Python framework for writing crypto trading strategies, testing them against past prices, and running them live.
- hummingbot/hummingbot20k stars
A free framework for writing and running automated trading programs on cryptocurrency exchanges.
- lballabio/QuantLib7.7k stars
The long-established free library for pricing and risk-managing financial instruments.
source venv/bin/activate pip install alpaca-py