Free lesson · Module 1: Setting up · about 8 min

1.3 Your free Alpaca paper account and API keys, kept safe

A short video intro to the lesson. The full lesson videos come with the course in early 2027.

A paper account is a practice brokerage account: real market prices, pretend money. It's where every agent in this course trades, and where the MonsterDesk desk itself trades.

1. Open the account

2. Make your API keys

On the paper dashboard, find API Keys and generate a key and a secret. They're how your code logs in. Treat them like a password: never paste them into a video, a forum post, a screenshot or a file you share.

3. Keep them in a .env file

In your my-desk folder make a file called .env (with the dot) and put your keys in it:

APCA_API_KEY_ID=your-key-here
APCA_API_SECRET_KEY=your-secret-here

If you ever use Git, add a file called .gitignore containing .env, so the keys are never uploaded anywhere.

4. Check the connection

Save this as check_account.py and run it with python3 check_account.py:

import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from alpaca.trading.client import TradingClient

load_dotenv()  # reads your keys from .env
client = TradingClient(os.environ["APCA_API_KEY_ID"], os.environ["APCA_API_SECRET_KEY"], paper=True)
acct = client.get_account()
print(f"Account status: {acct.status}, cash ${float(acct.cash):,.0f}")

If it prints your status and cash, you're connected. paper=True makes sure the code can only ever reach the paper account.

Checklist

Paper account open
Keys saved in .env, not in your code
check_account.py prints your cash