Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission
(Disclaimer that I&#x27;m working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.)<p>This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn&#x27;t use it as I&#x27;m not in the US, and I don&#x27;t trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I&#x27;m seeing.<p>The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar &#x27;mistakes&#x27; in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching costs and lock-in (looking at you, Reuters and Bloomberg).<p>On the one hand, retail brokers need to support popular programming languages and paradigms to gain traction. So, they are releasing http-based APIs, or popular language-specific libraries&#x2F;bindings for their proprietary APIs. But, they are doing this instead of pushing well-publicised battle-tested standards such as FIX[1], that would normalise the playing field across brokers. So my gut feel is that they are banking on users coding against their APIs and having some lock-in effects. Notable exception is that any broker that supports cTrader will have a FIX API, because cTrader provides that for them.<p>The problem is: if I write a bunch of code to work against Alpaca, TD Ameritrade, or whoever, that code will likely need to be revisited for some other broker like Robinhood. Granted, market connectivity code _should_ be well abstracted from my model if I&#x27;m following good design principles. But at least with FIX, the core concepts, fields, and messages remain the same across most FIX endpoints (NOS, ExecRpt, etc), allowing for a more uniform code holistically.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fixtrading.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fixtrading.org</a>