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Funding your account

Bellwether never moves money. Where deposits and withdrawals actually happen, what the Funding panel shows, and how a paper account gets its cash.

Who it is for
Owners & operators
Reading time
3 min read
Updated

Bellwether has no way to move money. There is no code path that initiates a deposit, a withdrawal, a bank link, a journal or a transfer of any kind, and the Alpaca trading keys it holds could not do it anyway. Money goes in and out of your account on Alpaca's own site, by you. Bellwether only reads the result.

Paper accounts come funded

A new Alpaca starts with simulated cash ($100k by default) and has no bank behind it. There is nothing to deposit: the Funding panel on Accounts reports the funding status as "paper (no bank link)" and that is correct. If you want to start over with a clean balance, create or reset the paper account in the Alpaca dashboard, generate keys for it, and connect those on Connect your broker (keys and safety has the replace-keys steps).

The house book before a broker is configured runs on the built-in simulated broker, whose cash is seeded at start and never wired anywhere. Its Funding panel says so in the Transfers section.

The Funding panel

Accounts shows a Funding card marked read-only next to the Broker card. It has four parts:

Accounts: your connection, funding (read only), the environment and adding another book, in one column.
Accounts: your connection, funding (read only), the environment and adding another book, in one column.
  • Connection: the broker name, your masked account number and the PAPER pill.
  • Cash · buying power: the same figures the Broker card shows, as the last synced them. Buying power is Alpaca's non-marginable figure, so it reads as free cash, not a margin headline; the Executor caps below your equity anyway.
  • Funding status: the status Alpaca reports (for paper, "paper (no bank link)"), the masked funding source or "no bank on file", and a note that it is as reported by the broker. Bank names and ACH relationships are not readable with trading keys, so nothing about a bank is stored or shown.
  • Transfers: "Transfers are managed at your broker", with an Open Alpaca transfers button that opens Alpaca's site in a new tab. This build does not read the broker's transfer history, so no deposits or withdrawals are listed here.

Under it, one line in bold: Bellwether never moves money. There is deliberately no button on this card that changes anything.

How a deposit shows up

When money does move on a real account, Alpaca records it as an account activity. The Executor reads deposits and withdrawals from that feed and treats them as flows, not profit: a $1,000 deposit raises your equity by $1,000 and your day's P&L by nothing, and the is measured net of it. Cash and buying power on both cards update on the Executor's next sync, about a minute later.

Paper accounts have no deposits, so the first real one, after the paper period and the switch to live, is worth checking by hand: the and the Accounts should agree that the deposit was a flow and not a gain. See paper vs live.

What Bellwether will never do

  • Ask you for bank details, or store a full account number.
  • Initiate or schedule a transfer, in either direction, on any account.
  • Use a bank-level Alpaca API. Only the Trading API and the market-data API are used, and orders only ever by the Executor. See keys and safety.

If cash on the card looks wrong, the broker is the source of truth: open Alpaca from the card and compare. If the two still disagree after a sync or two, that is worth a report through the flag in the top bar.