Connect a broker
Bring your own Alpaca paper account
SignalProphet trades on your broker, not a shared house account. You connect your own Alpaca paper keys; they’re encrypted, isolated to you, and paper-only by construction. No real orders are ever placed.
What you connect
The broker is bring-your-own: you create a free Alpaca paper tradingaccount, generate a paper API key and secret there, and paste them into SignalProphet. Those keys belong to your account and nobody else’s. Market data is provided by the platform, so the one thing you supply is the paper broker connection that lets the analyst simulate the plan.
How your keys are handled
- Encrypted at rest. Keys are encrypted with authenticated encryption (AES-256-GCM) before they touch the database, using an encryption key that is separate from the login/auth secret.
- Write-only. You can save or replace a key, but the secret is never echoed back to the browser and never written to logs — not even to you after you save it.
- Isolated to you.Credentials are stored per user and row-level-security’d, so one user’s broker session can never be used for another. There is no shared broker connection across accounts.
- Validated on save.When you connect, the keys are checked against Alpaca; if they’re wrong, not a paper account, or unreachable, you get a clear error instead of a half-wired connection.
Paper-only, by construction
The broker client refuses to build unless it’s pointed at Alpaca’s paperenvironment, and that check is re-run every time a connection is created. A non-paper configuration doesn’t silently fall through — it raises a hard paper-only violationand stops. SignalProphet is a research tool: it is not built to place real orders, and this guard is one of the reasons it can’t.
Connecting, step by step
- Create a free account at Alpaca and open its paper trading dashboard (the simulated-money environment).
- Generate a paper API key + secret there.
- In SignalProphet, open Connections & keys and paste the key and secret into the Alpaca connection.
- Save. The connection validates against Alpaca and confirms it’s a paper account before it’s marked connected.
- Pick the symbols you want on your watchlist — that’s what the analyst will scan.
Because it’s a simulated account, paper fills don’t capture every real-world friction — liquidity, slippage, fees, and execution timing differ with real money. That’s the honest limitation of paper trading, and it’s the reason the track record is gated so carefully.