How to Sync Your Alpaca Account with PortfolioTrackr

Why Alpaca users need a better portfolio view

Alpaca's dashboard is built for traders — it's excellent at order entry, execution, and account management. What it doesn't give you is a full portfolio management experience: P&L tracking with target prices and stop losses, price alerts via WhatsApp or Telegram, dividend income tracking, benchmark comparison, or a combined view across multiple accounts.

That's the gap PortfolioTrackr fills. By connecting your Alpaca account, all your real positions flow into PortfolioTrackr automatically, and you get the full feature set on top: live P&L, price targets, alerts on every channel, trade history log, and more — without having to move your account anywhere.

How the Alpaca connection works

PortfolioTrackr uses Alpaca's OAuth 2.0 API to connect to your account. The process takes about 60 seconds:

1. In PortfolioTrackr, go to Portfolios → Add Portfolio → Connect Broker → Alpaca.
2. You're redirected to Alpaca's own authorization page at alpaca.markets.
3. Log in with your Alpaca credentials directly on Alpaca's website — PortfolioTrackr never sees your password.
4. Alpaca shows the permissions being requested: read-only access to positions and account activity. Approve the request.
5. You're redirected back to PortfolioTrackr. Your positions appear immediately and begin syncing automatically.

From this point on, PortfolioTrackr polls your Alpaca account every 15 minutes and updates your portfolio with the latest positions and any new trades. You can also trigger a manual sync at any time by tapping the sync button on the portfolio screen.

Live accounts only — why paper trading is excluded

PortfolioTrackr connects to Alpaca live accounts only. Paper trading accounts are intentionally excluded. The reason is practical: paper trading uses simulated prices and fake funds — it doesn't reflect real capital at risk, so it doesn't belong in a real portfolio tracker. Mixing paper and live data would make your P&L figures meaningless.

If you use Alpaca for paper trading to test strategies, you can create a separate manual portfolio in PortfolioTrackr and enter those positions manually if you want to track them. But the broker connection is reserved for real, live accounts.

What you see in your Alpaca portfolio

Once connected, your Alpaca portfolio in PortfolioTrackr shows everything you'd expect from a managed position view:

• All current positions — every stock and crypto asset you hold, with live prices and current market value.
• Unrealized P&L — gain or loss on each position based on your average entry price from Alpaca.
• Trade history — completed buy and sell transactions pulled from Alpaca's activity feed, labelled as broker-synced trades.
• Portfolio-level P&L — total invested, total current value, and overall return percentage.

You can set price alerts on any position in your Alpaca portfolio — receive a WhatsApp or Telegram message when a stock hits your target or stop loss. The alerts work on any plan and don't require anything beyond the broker connection.

What you can't do in a broker portfolio

Because your Alpaca portfolio reflects your real live account, it's read-only in PortfolioTrackr — by design. You can't add positions, delete positions, or adjust entry prices manually. Any changes to your actual holdings go through Alpaca directly (by placing or closing trades in Alpaca's platform), and the sync updates PortfolioTrackr automatically within 15 minutes.

This read-only enforcement is a feature, not a limitation. It ensures your portfolio tracker always reflects reality. If you want to model a hypothetical position alongside your real Alpaca account, you can create a separate manual portfolio in PortfolioTrackr for that purpose.

Token expiry and reconnecting

Alpaca OAuth tokens are long-lived but can expire or be revoked. If your connection token expires, PortfolioTrackr shows a reconnect banner on your Alpaca portfolio screen. Tapping it takes you back through the Alpaca authorization page — a 30-second process that refreshes the connection without losing any of your data.

You can also revoke PortfolioTrackr's access at any time directly from Alpaca's developer settings at alpaca.markets/oauth/apps. Revoking access there immediately prevents PortfolioTrackr from fetching any further data.

Alpaca + PortfolioTrackr: the combined workflow

The most effective setup for Alpaca users is to keep your execution workflow entirely in Alpaca (placing orders, managing positions, reviewing fills) while using PortfolioTrackr for portfolio-level analysis and monitoring (P&L tracking, target prices, alerts, dividend tracking, benchmark comparison). The two tools complement each other rather than overlap.

Many PortfolioTrackr users with Alpaca accounts also maintain a separate manual portfolio for positions held at other brokers — for example, international stocks at a different broker, or crypto at an exchange not yet connected. The combined portfolio view in PortfolioTrackr aggregates across all your portfolios, so your total net worth picture is always in one place.

Frequently asked questions