Who We Are
Alpaca is a technology company headquartered in California Silicon Valley that builds an API-first stock brokerage platform (stock trading is offered through an account with Alpaca Securities LLC, a member of FINRA/SIPC, and crypto trading is offered through an account with Alpaca Crypto LLC, not a member of FINRA/SIPC). We are a team of diverse background individuals across the globe with deep financial and technology expertise, backed by some of the top investors in the industry. We are proud to be supported by the love of enthusiastic community members on various platforms.
Alpaca’s globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage business specialists, who collectively have decades offinancial services and technology industry experience at organizations such as FINRA, Apple, Wealthfront, Robinhood, EMC, Cloudera, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers. Alpaca is co-founded and led by Yoshi Yokokawa (CEO) and Hitoshi Harada (CTO/CPO). Our investors include a group of well-capitalizedinvestors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Elderidge, and Y Combinator as well as highly experienced industry angel investorssuch as Joshua S. Levine (former CTO/COO of ETRADE), Nate Rodland (former COO of Robinhood & GP of Elefund), Patrick O’Shaughnessy (“Invest Like the Best” podcast host & Partner of Positive Sum), Jacqueline Reses (former Executive Chairman of Square Financial Services), Asiff Hirjii (former President/COO of Coinbase), Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), and founders of leading Fintech companies including Plaid and Wealthsimple.
Who Is Alpaca For?
Alpaca is built for developers as well as technology-minded individuals and businesses. Our products are used in various ways including automation of investing and trading, building your own version of trading app, and integrating commission-free fractional stock trading services into your business. We have been on the other side of the table being algorithmic traders and building fintech investing apps. This experience drives us everyday to build products that can solve the pain that we ourselves had to go through in the past.
For account types and eligibility, please read Account Plans to learn more.
With an Alpaca brokerage account, users have access to:
- Commission-free fractional trading
- An official API that is constantly being improved and updated
- Easy to understand API documentation
- Free, real-time market data
- Paper trading and sandbox environment for testing your strategies and integrations
- Fully working, example algorithms that can be deployed immediately
- Multiple support channels
Please see the footer of the Alpaca homepage for disclosures.
How Alpaca Works
Why Commission-Free?
At Alpaca, we believe in the power of automation in trading and investing, which is notably different from that oftraditional securities brokers. With this belief, we focused on removing obstacles that would prevent such automationfrom happening. Naturally, automation tends to generate a large number of smaller transactions. At a traditional broker,this might result in an unbearable commission expense that outweighs all other costs. To address that, wemade it a point to offer our users commission-free automated trading. This breathes new life into manytypes of strategies, including those that trade frequently or use small order sizes. It also supportsdevelopers and technology-minded individuals in their journey by allowing them to start small andgradually scale up. Ultimately, our customers’ success leads to our success.
How We Make Money?
Securities brokers traditionally generate revenue in multiple ways including charging trading commissions, markingup margin lending rates and stock loan, keeping interest on cash deposits, receiving payment for order flow by routing orders tomarket makers, and marking up the data feed subscription.
Although we do not charge commissions, Alpaca may generate revenue in some of the same ways as traditional onlinebrokerages. These include:
- Interest on cash deposits
- Payment for order flow (“PFOF”) - Alpaca receives remuneration for routing your orders tomarket makers and exchanges. PFOF helps us offset the expense that occurs when clearing and executing ourcustomers’ trades. You can read more about PFOF in our Medium posthere.For Alpaca Securities SEC Rule 606 disclosures, please click here. It is important to note that our customers are not charged.
- Margin financing - Alpaca may charge interest for margin loans.
- Stock loan - Alpaca may charge stock loan fees for users who want to borrow stock to short sell.
Regulated Financial Institution
At the beginning of 2018 Alpaca Securities LLC (Alpaca Securities) became a member of FINRA and registeredwith the SEC to provide securities brokerage services. In order for Alpaca Securities to obtain suchmembership and registration, we had to go through rigorous paperwork and procedure development. AlpacaSecurities’ brokerage service and operations are led by David Rafteseth, who has decades of experience running brokerage operations at TD Ameritrade and Pension Financial, and supported by John Torola, who is a FINRA veteran and most recently led the compliance team at one of the biggestrobo advisory firms, Wealthfront. The team oversees a brokerage operations team consisting of licensedprofessionals who came from such firms as Waddell & Reed, TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, Axos Clearing, and Raymond James.
You can check the background of Alpaca on FINRA’s BrokerCheck.
Safety of Your Money
SIPC Membership
Alpaca Securities LLC is a member of SIPC, which protects securities customers of its members up to $500,000 (including $250,000 forclaims for cash). Explanatory brochure available upon request or at www.sipc.org.
Cryptocurrency trading is offered through an account withAlpaca Crypto LLC. Alpaca Crypto LLC is not a member of FINRA or SIPC.Cryptocurrencies are not stocks and your cryptocurrency investments are notprotected by either FDIC or SIPC.
Systems and Technology
We initially started Alpaca in 2015 as a pure technology company building adatabase solution for unstructured data, initially visual data and ultimatelytime-series data.
We believe there are and will be huge innovation opportunities in the financialindustry by (re)building technology to make the business scalable and flexible.In order to achieve our vision of providing faster and easier access offinancial markets to everyone on the planet, our platform systems, such asaccounting system, order management system and FIX clients, are written in Gofrom scratch and designed for massive scale in the cloud and on-premise. Hitoshi(Co-founder & CTO/CPO), who leads Alpaca’s technology team, comes from Greenplum(he was a lead architect of Greenplum), a parallel distributed database systemused globally by major financial institutions and their quant desks, wherethousands of database instances are running.
At the same time, we thrive with our strong developer communiy and are gratefulto live in the opensource age. Our GitHub hostsvariety of opensource SDKs and libraries as well as there are growing number ofcommunity-built ones outside of our GitHub. Hitoshi is also a big believer andcontributor in the opensource community and built window functions and commontable expressions in PostgreSQL, as well as initiated PostgreSQL-relatedprojects such as plv8js.
Alpaca is a truly technology company and is committed to innovating thefinancial industry using latest technology with community to help everyone onthe globe.
Suggestions or questions?
We're always happy to hear from you. You can contribute to these docs on GitHub, or you can join our Community Forum or Community Slack to get help from other community members and the Alpaca team.
