How MrStockTrader works

Everything on one page. No prior knowledge of automated trading assumed. If you can read English and follow three steps, you can use this site.

The big picture

MrStockTrader is a wrapper around your Alpaca brokerage account. You give it your API keys; a Python daemon on our server pulls market data, decides whether to buy or sell based on your saved rules, and places those trades through Alpaca on your behalf. You can pause or stop the engine from your browser at any time.

Your money never touches our company. It stays in your Alpaca account the whole time. We only need permission to read your account state and place orders.

Three steps to start trading

1. Sign up with a username + email + password. No card needed.
2. Paste your Alpaca API keys. Use Paper keys first — the sandbox is fully functional and risk-free. Live keys when you're ready. Enter Alpaca keys
3. Click Start on the Controls page. The daemon's next 60-second loop picks you up and begins watching the market on your behalf. Open Controls

A checklist banner appears on Main until all three are done; it disappears the moment you're fully set up.

What the engine does each 60-second loop

1. Heartbeat — writes a status file so the Controls page can show "alive".
2. Reconcile — for every order we submitted today or yesterday that's still "submitted", asks Alpaca for the latest status and rolls our ledger forward to filled / partial / canceled / rejected.
3. Monitor — for every position you own, checks your stop-loss, trailing stop, take-profit, end-of-day flatten, and any manual "Sell now" flag. Sells if any rule triggers.
4. Scan — pulls Alpaca's most-actives, applies your filters (price band, min volume, max spread, liquidity observer, whitelist / blacklist), and ranks the survivors by volume.
5. Trade — if anything passes filters, applies safety rails (per-loop cap, per-day cap, daily spend cap, daily loss cap, cool-down, dedupe, post-sell cooldown, buying-power check) and places at most one market buy.
6. Notify — fires email and/or webhook when an event you opted in for occurs (auto-pause, daily loss cap hit, end-of-day summary).

Safety rails (all on by default)

• Daily spend cap — never spends more than this much on new buys in one day ($500 default).
• Daily loss kill-switch — disables new buys for the rest of the day once realized losses hit this amount ($100 default).
• Per-loop / per-day buy caps — max 1 buy per 60-second loop, max 10 per day.
• Stop-loss + trailing stop + take-profit — 10% / 10% / 25% defaults, all tunable.
• End-of-day flatten — closes every position 5 minutes before regular close, so you wake up to a flat book.
• Post-sell cooldown — after selling a symbol, refuses to re-buy it for 30 minutes.
• Liquidity observer — rejects tickers whose minute-bar volume has collapsed to under 10% of the day's average.
• Circuit breaker — after 5 consecutive error-laden loops, auto-pauses your engine. You clear it with a button.
• Dry-run mode — simulate orders only; no real trades sent to Alpaca. Use this while you're tuning rules.

Pages

What the engine remembers for you

Everything you do is stored privately and survives any website redeploy. You don't manage these files directly — the engine reads and writes them for you.

• Per-day event log (every buy / sell / error / end-of-day summary)
• Per-day order log (each order from submitted through filled / canceled / rejected)
• Active stop / trail / target watch list for each open position
• Per-loop snapshot of your positions for the Compare view
• Scanner alerts: rank jumps, price spikes, volume surges
• Notification log: every email / webhook send attempt + result
• Daily counters: spend, loss, cooldowns, circuit-breaker state

CSV exports for the event log and order log are under Timeline. Backups, restores, and named sessions live under Order.

Getting help

Open the status page if you suspect the service is down. Forgot password? Reset it here. Otherwise contact an admin out-of-band.