Alpaca Markets
Commission-free brokerage API for programmatic stock trading. Used by Nate Herk to build a fully autonomous Claude Code cloud-routine trading agent named "Bull".
Key facts
- Type: Trading brokerage API
- Status: Active
- Paper trading: $100K virtual account for testing without real funds
- Live trading: real-money account via same API
- MCP server available: yes — can be plugged directly into Claude Code
- Key endpoints: market data, order placement (market, limit, stop), portfolio management, account status
What it does in this ecosystem
Alpaca + Perplexity API + Claude Code cloud routines = a five-routine autonomous trading system:
1. Pre-market: Perplexity API gathers news → identify 3 stocks, generate trading plan → write to today.md
2. Market open: read today.md, place trades via Alpaca, write executed orders to memory files
3. Midday: check positions, adjust stop-losses, write risk management decisions
4. End-of-day: journal performance, write lessons to journal.md
5. Friday: weekly review and strategy update
All five routines share memory via committed files in the same GitHub repo. [src-010]
[src-086] adds a real-money benchmark variant: Nate's OpenClaw trading bot "Bull" used Alpaca to manage a $10,000 account for 30 days, make buy/sell/stop decisions, and compare results against both Salmon's separate agent and the S&P 500 baseline. The experiment is useful as an Autonomous Trading Agents case study, not as evidence that unattended AI trading is safe or reliably profitable.
Related
- See also: Claude Code, Perplexity API, OpenClaw
- Concepts: Claude Code Cloud Routines, Stateless Agent Memory Pattern, Autonomous Trading Agents, Agent Security Boundaries