Alpaca: Stock Trading API with Yoshi Yokokawa

Stock trading takes place across a variety of software platforms. Etrade and Schwab have allowed individual traders to buy securities for decades. Robinhood built a business around a similar model, but also removed the commission. Wealthfront and Betterment provide “roboadvisor” services that abstract away the underlying securities and focus on managing a risk profile.

Each of these services has a programmatic execution system for managing assets. In order for a developer to build a product like Robinhood or Wealthfront, that developer needs access to an API that can execute trades.

Alpaca is an API for stock trading. Alpaca can be used to build financial products, apps, and algorithmic trading programs. Yoshi Yokokawa is the founder of Alpaca, and he joins the show to talk about why he built an API for trading and the potential applications of Alpaca. Yoshi’s background includes work in finance at Lehman Brothers, a period spent as an individual day trader, and the previous company he started selling custom trading algorithms to enterprises.

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Transcript

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