alpaca-trading-paper-trading

alpaca-trading-paper-trading is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from alpacahq/alpaca-skills. It costs 95 tokens per session (9,977 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for previewing, submitting, inspecting, and managing paper-trading orders through Alpaca’s Trading API. Paper trading uses simulated money rather than real funds.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for turning backtest results, manual ideas, scheduled triggers, or automated signals into paper orders for US stocks, options, and cryptocurrency.
Why use it?
It adds checks around trade details, assumptions, and secrets before an order is submitted to a paper-trading account.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit It is for turning backtest results, manual ideas, scheduled triggers, or automated signals into paper orders for US stocks, options, and cryptocurrency.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add alpacahq/alpaca-skills --skill paper-trading
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for alpaca-trading-paper-trading

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for alpaca-trading-paper-trading

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 95 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 9,977 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 41
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 756
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00095 $0.09977
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.04988
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.01995
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00998

Measured 12d ago against content hash 0c9f90ca6af4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alpaca-trading-paper-trading scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

- Direct REST API calls via `curl`, `httpx`, `requests`, or any HTTP client
skills/trading-api/paper-trading/SKILL.md · 784 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 784 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Alpaca Paper Trading

Use this skill when you want your AI agent to preview, submit, inspect, and manage paper-trading orders using Alpaca's Trading API.

This skill is written for you, a Trading API user working with your own Alpaca paper-trading account, credentials, and local workspace. Your agent should make assumptions visible, protect secrets, and confirm order details before submission.

This is the generic (implementation-agnostic) version of the paper-trading skill. It describes the workflow, safety gates, and output contract without binding to any specific execution tool. You can use the Alpaca Python SDK (alpaca-py), the REST API directly, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, C#, or any tool that speaks to the Trading API. CLI-specific and MCP-specific companion skills exist for users who prefer those execution paths — see §10 for links.


0 - How your AI agent should use this skill

  1. Start with your job. Identify what the signal is — a backtest output, a manual trade idea, a scheduled trigger, or an automated system event. Your agent reads any associated context (backtest run folder, strategy description, alert payload) to understand the intent.

  2. Reiterate the strategy logic. Your agent restates the strategy interpretation in plain language — entry/exit conditions, indicator parameters, position sizing, and any assumptions — and confirms with you that the interpretation is correct before proceeding.

  3. Gather and confirm ALL detailed configurations before execution. Your agent collects every order parameter explicitly:

    • Timing of execution (immediate, scheduled, conditional)
    • Asset class (US equity, US options, crypto)
    • Symbol(s)
    • Side (buy / sell)
    • Quantity or notional amount
    • Order type (market, limit, stop, stop_limit, trailing_stop)
    • Time-in-force (day, gtc, ioc, fok, opg, cls)
    • Limit price and/or stop price if applicable
    • Extended-hours flag
    • Risk controls (max position size, max notional, stop-loss, take-profit)
    • Margin usage

Read the full file on GitHub · 784 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 784 lines · 95 tokens per session scan A 0c9f90ca6af4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alpaca-trading-paper-trading is a skill published in the GitHub repository alpacahq/alpaca-skills (147 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 95 tokens to every session and 9,977 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.