Pricing and fees

Q - Does Alpaca charge fees to transfer money in or out of my account?

No, Alpaca does not charge a fee to deposit or withdraw funds via Automated Clearing House (ACH), or to deposit funds via non-ACH and wire transfers. A $25 fee is charged for outgoing domestic and $50 for outgoing international non-ACH and wire transfers.

Q - Will I incur commission or clearing fees with Alpaca?

No. For U.S. equity trades there are no commissions charged and all clearing fees are paid by Alpaca Securities LLC to our clearing firm Velox Clearing.

Note : Regulatory fees are assessed on all sell orders. Refer to the Regulatory Fees section for more information.

Q - What are the regulatory fees?

Regulatory fees are charged by the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) on all sell orders. Alpaca Securities LLC does not benefit financially from these charges, and they are passed on to the relevant regulatory agencies in full.

  • SEC: $22.90 per $1,000,000 of principal (sells only) - this fee is rounded up to the nearest penny on each fill or partial-fill.
  • FINRA Trading Activity Fee (TAF): $.000119 per share (sells only) - this fee is rounded up to the nearest penny on each fill or partial fill and will be no greater than $5.95.

Q - Do I have to pay for them separately?

No. You are not responsible for paying regulatory fees separately, as they are deducted from sales proceeds.

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I am wondering when the regulatory fees are applied. Reading on FINRAā€™s website here, they say that fee is assessed on a monthly basis. Meaning the broker reports sales at the end of each month and a fee is calculated and charged from that. Am I correct in assuming Alpacaā€™s deduction occurs at the end of each month? For example, I perform 30 separate sell orders for 1 share each within one month, what will my fee be? .30 or .01?

Same question for SEC fee. From the regulations document (see section 2.A) they say it is evaluated on a monthly basis upon submission of a form by the broker.

If Alpaca is pocketing an extra .01 per sell order from rounding, then its essentially a .01 commission for all my sell orders. A bit misleading Iā€™d say if youā€™re not mentioning this in the ā€œAbout Alpacaā€ docs or here.

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All great questions!

First, ā€œAm I correct in assuming Alpacaā€™s deduction occurs at the end of each month?ā€
No, fees are typically deducted from a userā€™s account before markets open on the next trading day. Alpacaā€™s current clearing firm, Electronic Transaction Clearing (ETC), pays the Trading Activity Fee (TAF) to FINRA monthly as described in the FINRA link above. However, ETC debits user accounts daily. The charges are rounded up to the nearest penny so, if one sells 100 shares in a day, the .0119 TAF would be rounded up to .02. The SEC fees are handled in a similar fashion.

Alpaca does does not benefit financially from these charges which are passed through to the clearing firm. Alpaca is not ā€˜pocketingā€™ the fees. Many commission based brokers include these fees in their commissions. Alpaca doesnā€™t hide or bury these fees. These fees are published here and described in this post.

Normally these fees, which are only assessed on sells, are small. If one sells 500 shares at an average price of 10 the combined fees would be (500 x .000119) + (500 x 10 / 100,000,000 x 22.10). This equals .06 + .12 or .18. This is about .004% of the sale price. Also note that currently these fees do not get assessed in paper trading. Only live trading.

However, these fees can add up and very good to point these out. Consider a day trading scenario. One has $25,000 in their account. They use 4x margin to trade a ā€˜round tripā€™ buy and sell of $100,000. They do this ā€˜round tripā€™ 10 times in a day. The stock price is again 10 and total shares sold are 10,000 x 10 or 100,000. The combined fees would be (10,000 x 10 x .000119) + (100,000 x 10 / 100,000,000 x $22.10). This equals $11.90 + $22.10 or $34.00. Again, this is about .004% of the sale price, but as a percent of equity ($25,000) this is about .14%. Many day trade strategies shoot for small daily increases, often less than .5%. So, assume a trader has a super duper strategy which they have paper traded (ie no fees) and resulted in .25% average daily return. Compounded the annual return is almost 90%. However, in live trading, these fees will cut this return almost in half. This is an extreme case, but something to consider when trading high turns and high leverage.

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Hey Dan, thanks this is good info. Since ETC assesses the fees daily, rather than monthly, youā€™re still paying up to $.62 per month extra (from fees being rounded on each day, not each month). But that is much better than rounding for every sell order, which is what I was most worried about.

I entered all my personal information to open an account. Now the page says to press the submit button. There is no submit button, and the create account button is inactive.

@john_doe Did you get your account opened? Often some of the responses require specific inputs. If you are still having issues, send an email to the Alpaca support team support@alpaca.markets. They can should be able to help.

Hi Dan,

Good morning

Please can developers anywhere in the world use your Broker API to build an investment app for free?

it is on your page that:

"Investment advisor

Connect your investment advisor service with commission-free and fractional investing. You can utilize our developer-friendly API to build quants-heavy apps.

Build a trading app to allow users to trade US stocks.
Alpaca powers apps from various countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States."

So, any fintech in the world, can use your broker API to build investment API for free, right?

Thank you in advance for your reply.

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I executed three small day trades to test the fee calculations for the TAF fee. All three would have generated <.01 feeā€¦so assuming it gets rounded up, that would be THREE .01 fees. But I was only charged for TWO .01 fees, for the three sell trades. The average Joe would go ā€œThatā€™s great, you saved .01 when you should have been charged.ā€ But I record all my trades in my db, and I need them to match what Iā€™m charged. So why is there a difference between what I calculated and what I was charged? The SEC fees were accurate. Thanks!!

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this forum need to pay the membership per month?