Brokers

You pick the broker on Settings, paste what it hands out from its own dashboard, and Desk · Home fills. Six connect as the desk comes. Nothing places an order.

The six

AlpacaUnited States. Key and secret from the dashboard; a paper account has its own pair.Holdings and cash ICICI DirectIndia. App key and secret, and a login every trading day. Serves live ticks, futures and options, margin, the options tape.The full screen Interactive BrokersWorldwide. A Flex Web Service token and a query, no gateway program to run. Positions as of the previous close.Holdings and cash TradierUnited States. One access token; the sandbox account has its own.Holdings and cash Trading 212United Kingdom and Europe. A key and secret generated in the app. Invest and ISA accounts.Holdings and cash ZerodhaIndia. A Kite Connect app and a login every trading day.Holdings and cash

Any other broker with an API is one file your agent writes from that broker's documentation. A broker with no API exports a file, and Desk · Book takes it.

What every broker shows

Holdings and cash. A line the broker does not price is marked from Yahoo's free feed, so the account is valued live whatever the broker hands out.

What some brokers add

What the screen shows beyond that depends on what the broker gives. Live ticks on Watch · Home, open futures and options, the margin cushion, the index options tape, minute candles and a futures book on the ticker page appear when the broker's feed serves them, and a broker that serves none of them simply has a smaller Home screen. Of the six, ICICI Direct serves all of them today; the other five return holdings and cash.

The market follows the broker

Once a broker is connected, the desk knows which market it trades in, and the home screens take that market's shape: its session hours on the status dot, its index on Risk, its currency and digit grouping, its exchanges in the add box on Watch · Home, and where the public record offers them, the results calendar, the filings block on the home ticker page and the market's own macro cards. Markets has the detail.

Read-only, always

Every broker file reads. There is no order code in the desk, on purpose, and the keys you paste are the read-only kind wherever the broker offers one. If you extend the desk to trade, that is your own build, under your broker's and your regulator's rules.

Most brokers keep the connection alive for weeks or months once the key is set, and there is nothing to do in the morning. A broker whose regulator requires a fresh login every trading day is the exception; of the six, the two Indian ones are like that, and Settings says so next to the broker's name. On a morning you want that account live, open Settings, click Open the broker login, log in on the page it opens, and paste what the address bar hands back. If the redirect address in your broker app is http://localhost:8765/settings, it arrives on its own and there is nothing to paste. Skip the login and the desk keeps the last saved book, re-priced live, with a ribbon saying the session is off; every other screen is unaffected.