Broker setup
Connect Alpaca
Paper trading available5 steps2 fields
Alpaca keys cannot move money out of your account — by design. Practice keys and real-money keys are separate; pick the right mode before generating.
Step by step
Getting your Alpaca API keys
- 1Open Alpaca and sign inNew here? Sign up for free — practice mode needs no funding or ID check.
- 2Switch to the right modeIn the top-left, flip the account switch to:
- PAPER — practice (free, no funding needed)
- LIVE — real money (requires ID verification first)
- 3Find the "Your API Keys" boxLook on the right side on desktop, or near the bottom on mobile.
- 4Tap "Generate New Key"Alpaca shows two values — a Key ID and a Secret — in a one-time confirmation panel.
- 5Copy both right awayThe Secret is shown ONCE. If you lose it, you have to generate a new pair — which breaks any bot already using the old one.
Permissions
What to enable — and what to leave OFF
✓Enable these
- Trading (the only thing Alpaca keys can do)
✕Never enable these
- (Alpaca keys can never move money out — withdrawals only happen through the dashboard)
Why this matters:Soar only ever needs read + place-order permissions. If you give a key withdraw or transfer access, anyone with that key could move funds — including a security risk if your machine is ever compromised. Disabling withdraw on the key itself means even a worst-case leak can't drain your account.
What you paste
The fields Soar asks for
- API Key ID
paste Key IDVisible in the "Your API Keys" panel on your Alpaca dashboard. - API Secret
paste secret hereOnly shown ONCE at generation. If lost, you have to regenerate.
Security & trust
Where your keys live
Soar passes your Alpacakeys straight from your browser into YOUR Cloudflare Worker. Soar's servers see them once during the ~30-second deploy window, then never again.
The bot that talks to Alpaca runs on the free Cloudflare Workers tier in your own Cloudflare account. You see + control everything from your Cloudflare dashboard. You can rotate the keys, pause the bot, or destroy the Worker at any time — Soar has zero ability to undo that.
Read the full security model →See also
Related help topics
The connect-broker wizard explained
How the full 7-step flow works, end to end.
Security & trust
Op 18 / key safety / attestation / what Soar can and can't do.
How the autonomous bot works
Cloudflare Workers, scheduling, signal routing, position management.
Glossary
Plain-English definitions for every trading term Soar uses.
