alpaca

What This Skill Does

The Alpaca Trading Skill is a robust integration designed for OpenClaw that connects directly to the Alpaca API, enabling seamless programmatic trading of stocks and cryptocurrencies. It serves as a comprehensive bridge between your AI agent and the financial markets, offering functionalities that range from real-time market data retrieval to complex portfolio management. Whether you are looking for current price quotes, historical bar data, or need to manage active orders, this skill provides a unified command-line interface to execute your financial strategies with precision. It is built to support both paper trading, perfect for backtesting and strategy refinement, and live trading for real-world execution. The tool handles the complexities of order placement, including market, limit, stop, and stop-limit orders, while ensuring safety through a series of built-in guardrails.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, follow these steps:

1. Execute the installation command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/vamzi/alpaca.
2. Ensure you have your Alpaca API Key and Secret Key ready.
3. Configure your credentials by either exporting environment variables (ALPACA_API_KEY, ALPACA_SECRET_KEY, ALPACA_PAPER) or by creating a JSON file at ~/.openclaw/credentials/alpaca.json. Verify your paper trading settings to ensure you are operating in the desired environment before executing any live trades.

Use Cases

• Market Research: Quickly fetch live price quotes and historical charts for tickers to analyze trends.
• Algorithmic Trading: Execute automated buy or sell orders based on external triggers or strategy logic.
• Portfolio Monitoring: Maintain oversight of your account balance, equity, and current open positions.
• News Analysis: Aggregate market news for specific tickers to gauge sentiment before making trade decisions.
• Risk Management: Utilize stop-loss and stop-limit orders to protect your capital in volatile market conditions.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the current market price for NVDA and let me know if I have any open positions for it."
2. "Place a market buy order for 5 shares of AAPL and verify that I have enough buying power in my account."
3. "Get the latest news for TSLA and list all my current pending limit orders."

Tips & Limitations

• Safety Guardrails: The skill includes built-in price validation, buying power checks, and market hours detection to prevent accidental errors. Always review cost confirmation prompts unless you are using the --force flag, which should be reserved for advanced users.
• Order Management: Take advantage of the cancel all command to quickly clear your order book during sudden market shifts.
• Session Awareness: Be mindful of pre-market and after-hours limitations, as trades placed outside of standard hours may remain queued until market open.