Alpaca Skills

The repository holds exactly eleven skills, named on the convention alpaca-<product-scope>-<skill-name>. One sits under the Trading API — alpaca-trading-backtest, whose declared workflow runs from strategy idea to formalized rules, confirmed assumptions, CLI data fetch, local script, artifacts and report — and ten under the Broker API: integration, account onboarding and KYC, funding transfers, journals, trading on behalf of accounts, market data, SSE events, reconciliation and idempotency, rate limits and resilience, and money precision. The backtest skill describes itself as “not a promise that a strategy will work in live markets. It is a reproducible research workflow.” Credentials come from alpaca profile login or the ALPACA_API_KEY and ALPACA_SECRET_KEY environment variables; install a single skill with npx skills add alpacahq/alpaca-skills --skill alpaca-trading-backtest.

Disclosure discipline is the pack’s strongest feature. The backtest skill mandates a block in every report, notes.md, notebook, dashboard or exported result stating that the backtest “is a hypothetical historical simulation and does not represent actual trading performance” and that “backtested results do not guarantee future results”, along with the dependencies that shape them — market-data quality, feed selection, corporate-action handling, fees, slippage, liquidity, taxes, execution assumptions and implementation details. A separate mandatory paragraph covers paper trading being simulated. Modeling Alpaca securities trading-activity fees additionally requires linking the Alpaca Brokerage Fee Schedule PDF and recording its revision date, the extraction timestamp, the modeled fee categories, and any fee items intentionally excluded.

Scope is narrower than the skill count suggests: only one of the eleven is strategy research, and several of the remaining ten — KYC onboarding, funding transfers, journals, money precision, reconciliation, rate limits — are generic fintech back-office rather than quant work. Everything targets Alpaca’s own APIs and needs the Alpaca CLI plus Alpaca keys, so nothing here is broker-portable, though free paper-trading credentials keep the barrier low. The repository is also very young and already quiet: created 2026-06-16, its entire commit history spans thirteen days to 2026-06-29, with no activity since — too early to judge how it will be maintained. At 109 stars and 11 forks, its standing rests on first-party vendor authorship, not community uptake.