Alpaca MCP Server

Alpaca MCP Server Overview

The Alpaca MCP Server bridges the gap between conversational AI assistants and real‑time stock trading. By exposing Alpaca’s trading API through the Model Context Protocol, it allows assistants such as Claude to execute trades, retrieve market data, and manage portfolios entirely via natural language. This eliminates the need for developers to write custom integrations or maintain separate SDKs, enabling a single conversational interface to serve as both data consumer and trading agent.

What problem does it solve? Traditional algorithmic trading pipelines require separate codebases for data ingestion, strategy logic, and order execution. The Alpaca MCP Server consolidates these steps into a unified service that any MCP‑capable client can consume. Developers can prototype strategies, monitor positions, and even place orders without leaving the chat environment, dramatically speeding iteration cycles and reducing boilerplate.

Key features of the server are:

• Real‑time market data: Fetch live quotes and historical price bars for any ticker.
• Account insights: Access balances, buying power, and overall account status with a single call.
• Position visibility: List all open positions and their performance metrics.
• Order management: Create market or limit orders, view order status, and cancel orders on demand.
• Safety controls: Operate in paper‑trading mode by default, with an easy switch to live trading for production use.

These capabilities translate into practical use cases such as:

• Strategy testing: Ask the assistant to simulate a trade and immediately see its impact on portfolio metrics.
• Portfolio monitoring: Prompt the assistant for current holdings or equity curves and receive instant visual summaries.
• Automated execution: Trigger a market order after a natural language signal (“Buy 5 shares of MSFT”) and confirm execution status.
• Risk management: Cancel all open orders or close positions when market conditions change, guided by conversational cues.

Integration with AI workflows is straightforward. Once the MCP server is running, any client that supports MCP can register it as a tool source. The assistant then automatically discovers the available functions (, , etc.) and can invoke them as part of a multi‑step reasoning chain. This tight coupling allows the assistant to ask clarifying questions, validate user intent, and execute trades with minimal friction.

Unique advantages of the Alpaca MCP Server include its paper‑trading default—a safety net for experimentation—and its compact API surface, which reduces cognitive load for developers. By turning a complex trading platform into a set of well‑defined, conversational tools, it empowers developers to focus on strategy and user experience rather than plumbing.