timothygoltser

Hey Charles, we're really excited to be working on tooling to make data sharing easier for companies and their customers!

The activation energy for setting up robust direct-to-customer pipelines is still too high on the provider’s end - it’s great to see this approach getting more investment recently.

All the best to Prequel as well!

Thank you - we'll submit a proposal shortly!

Thanks!

Hey all, one of the co-founders of Pipebird here - I'll be around to answer any questions you might have. Would love to hear your feedback!

We collect a user's credentials (usernames + passwords) and exchange them immediately for access and refresh tokens. We use the term "credentials" as we've seen it used colloquially - access and refresh tokens certainly fall under the formal definition of credentials, but we usually call them "sensitive tokens" or something similar.

Additionally, in the case of an API like Webull's which accepts a salted MD5 hash of the user's password, the user's plaintext password will never touch our servers.

Thanks! Teller looks really cool - there's definitely a real market for what you're doing, though I don't envy your position having to deal with the big banks given how misaligned incentives are in the retail banking industry.

You made some good points about direct integrations - some of the public APIs we deal with are totally separate from the brokerages' internal APIs and that's made painfully apparent during an integration. It has taken us months to get access to prod keys at some of the largest institutions and many of them seek to impose pretty onerous conditions on our customers and their users once we get through their compliance processes. Still, we've seen brokerages becoming more receptive to the idea of opening up their APIs, so we're optimistic that we can form partnerships with them and nudge them toward building better public APIs.

TD Ameritrade is the biggest brokerage we deal with that has a documented public API intended for external use, but the documentation isn't entirely accurate and the rate limits on some endpoints are fairly restrictive by default (120 req/min, which is shared across all accounts connected to an OAuth app - we had to have this bumped by several orders of magnitude for our use case). TDA has been great to work with overall though; getting in contact with the right people there was the main challenge.

Alpaca provides a great API for equities (and now crypto) trading, but the instrument and order strategy support is limited compared to the likes of TD/IBKR. They've been API-first from the start, so their API is more modern and pretty painless to work with.

We provision both a live and sandbox app with 3 free test links each so that you can test out the API after signing up - we'll make sure to display that more prominently on our site/in our docs to avoid confusion on this point. Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you! We're going to be adding support for options sometime next week. IB is also on our roadmap, though we don't have an exact timeline for an integration yet.

Definitely - we've gotten this feedback from several of our users and it's a high-priority item for us. We'll be adding the ability to limit scopes on a per-app basis this week.

We've had the same experience in 2022. An afternoon with an HTTPToolkit interceptor is usually all it takes to reverse engineer a brokerage's API; we spend most of our time paving over various brokerage-specific idiosyncrasies and responding to breaking changes in their APIs. We've discovered that building sane abstractions over the various retail brokerages in the US is a hard design problem given the variability in supported assets, account types, order strategies, authentication strategies, etc.

Thankfully we haven't had to field any calls from irate, sleep-deprived CTOs yet - running experiments against APIs during local business hours only could be a good hack for avoiding those :)

Absolutely. We don't have a timeline on it as of yet, but we've received several requests for IBKR support (especially from developers building apps that serve non-US markets), so it's something we'll be looking into soon.

You're right that most retail investors don't pay attention to the specifics of how margin requirements are calculated. To my knowledge, the only brokerage that's readily accessible to retail investors that provides SPAN margining is IB, and relatively few (US) retail investors use them compared to the more mainstream brokerages.

In terms of cross-asset-and-portfolio margin management, it definitely makes more sense to base risk calculations on a broad view of positions rather than the composition of a single portfolio.

I'm slightly out of my depth here; this is an interesting perspective I haven't seen yet, so I'll definitely be doing some more research into the problems you described.