February 2022 Summaries

Full extended hours trading allows market participants to buy and sell securities outside of regular core session hours, enabling traders to react quickly to news and events that occur during non-trading hours. This feature gives users flexibility to trade on their schedule and provides commission-free trading for US exchange-listed securities from 4 am to 8 pm ET Monday to Friday. The extended session is available before the market opens and after the market closes, allowing traders to make trades outside of the normal market hours, which can be particularly beneficial for international end-users who have different local time zones. By enabling full extended hours trading, users can test and embed this feature into their fintech apps, providing additional flexibility to buy and sell whole shares in the US market during extended hours convenient to their local time zones.

The Alpaca Corporate Actions API: Announcements provides access to an extensive corporate actions database, offering detailed information on previous and upcoming dividends, mergers, spinoffs, and stock splits. The API allows users to stay up-to-date on upcoming announcements that may impact current holdings or assess potential investments, simplify bookkeeping, and support trading strategies based on corporate action events. Users can interact with the data dating back to April 2020, but bespoke reorganization announcements are not currently available. The API supports various query parameters, including type, symbol, CUSIP, and date range, enabling users to retrieve general or specific announcement information.

Onfido has launched its SDK for Broker API, offering a new Alpaca KYC as a service that simplifies international end-user onboarding. This solution provides real-time document verification and biometric identification across 195 countries, reducing friction in the customer identification process. By integrating Onfido's SDK into fintech apps, developers can speed up account approval rates by up to 5x, increase security with robust privacy-protection policies, and prevent up to 98.7% of ID fraud attempts. The solution is designed to simplify and remove complexity from the onboarding process, offering real-time feedback and automatic prefilled sign-up forms captured from user IDs.

We're excited to announce Alpaca's News API, an extension of our Market Data API, providing developers with access to real-time and historical financial news through a user-friendly API. The limited-time beta version is currently available for free with rate limits determined by the current Market Data API subscription plans. News API allows users to retrieve news data dating back to 2015, query by various fields, and provides WebSocket real-time data streaming. It can be used for backtesting trading strategies, sentiment analysis, and engaging end-users with creative in-platform news displays. The API covers stock market and crypto news data, includes full-length articles, real-time headlines, and historical querying capabilities. Alpaca News API is a valuable tool for fintech developers to enhance their apps and provide users with high-quality financial news insights.

The Alpaca Trade SDK now supports accessing historical and live news data through its News API, which has been integrated with the SDKs for Python, TypeScript/JS, C#/.NET, and Go. The integration allows developers to access news data using methods such as get_news or subscribe_news within the Streaming client. Additionally, some methods have been deprecated due to the deprecation of Market Data V1. The SDKs also support raw trade data subscription through the Streaming client, and a new websocket client has been added for live news data in some languages.