Algorithmic Trading on Alpaca's Platform - Intro

Alpaca has revolutionized trading by providing a commission free, API only stock trading platform. This course will help you gain basic understanding about Alpaca's API and learn how to use it to implement building blocks of your trading strategy. The course will help you understand key concepts pertaining to API architecture (REST/HTTPS based API, Websocket connection etc.) and will prepare you well to take the next step and build complex trading strategies on Alpaca's platform. You do not have to create a trading account with Alpaca to explore their API, as they also provide an excellent paper trading account which can help you test your strategies as well.

This free 2 hour course is meant to give you a gentle introduction to Alpaca's API but you can still expect to gain a number of skills from this course including:

• What, Why & How of API trading

• Alpaca's API fundamentals

• Extracting historical data

• Streaming tick level data

• Extracting account and position level information

• Next steps and where to get help

  
  

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Important note - Course prerequisites:

Please note that this course requires basic python proficiency. At the minimum, you should be comfortable with:

• basic python data types and format

• basic python data structures such as list, dictionary, tuple etc.

• how to create python functions

• how to implement loops in python

• installing and importing libraries 

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