Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-skillsnpx agentmods add skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading-cliWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading-cli)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading-cli/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/paper-trading-cli.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 3 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 542 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 Rogue Agent · line 616 Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 785 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.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00067 | $0.08764 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00034 | $0.04382 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00013 | $0.01753 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00876 |
Grade A, and why
alpaca-trading-paper-trading-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings 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 11d 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.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 817 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Alpaca Paper Trading — CLI Version
Use this skill when you want your AI agent to preview, submit, inspect, and manage paper-trading orders using the Alpaca CLI.
This skill is written for you, a Trading API user working with your own Alpaca paper-trading account, CLI profile, and local workspace. Your agent executes all operations through the alpaca command-line tool, giving you full visibility into every command and its output.
This is the CLI-specific version. A generic (implementation-agnostic) version and an MCP-server version are also available as companion skills.
0 - How your AI agent should use this skill
- Start with the signal source. Identify the origin of the trade idea — a backtest result, manual idea, scheduled trigger, or strategy output.
- Reiterate strategy logic and confirm with you. Summarize the thesis, expected behavior, and conditions under which the order should execute. Wait for your confirmation before proceeding.
- Gather and confirm ALL configurations. Timing, asset class, symbol, side, qty/notional, order type, TIF, limit/stop prices, extended-hours flag, risk controls, and margin usage — every parameter must be stated and confirmed.
- Confirm the CLI resolves to the paper endpoint. Run
alpaca doctorand require itsTrading:line to readhttps://paper-api.alpaca.markets. If it shows the live endpoint, STOP immediately and alert you. - Show a complete order preview using a formatted table. Include the exact CLI command that will run.
- Ask whether you want explicit confirmation before each order (default: ON). Respect your preference for the session.
- Submit via
alpaca order submitwith the paper profile. - Return order ID, status, submitted payload, and next inspection commands so you can independently verify.
- Monitor order lifecycle with
alpaca order get. Report fills, rejections, cancellations with portfolio impact. - Never place live trades. Verify the resolved paper endpoint before every submission. If any ambiguity exists about the environment, STOP.
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.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 817 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 40867969d5b9
alpaca-trading-paper-trading-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository alpacahq/alpaca-skills (147 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 8,764 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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