Alpaca Growing Fast As Agentic Trading Explodes, Everyone Is A Hedge Fund Manager and The Nine Finger Fintech Club

Meet my friend Hitoshi, the co-founder of Alpaca (Social Leverage was the seed investor back in 2017 and they recently raised $150 million series D). The company helps 1,000 Robinhood’s bloom around the globe.

Hitoshi and his co-founder Yoshi are in New York for the company board meeting and we all had dinner the other night. Here I am with Yoshi the other founder and our friend Kunal from Eldridge (also an investor)…

I rarely see Hitoshi, who has moved around as the company has grown, from San Francisco to Kyoto and now Dubai. Hitoshi is the genius coder/developer behind the Alpaca API’s and powerful tools. As you can see in the photo above, Hitoshi lost his right index finger. Unlike me, his finger could not be saved. He had a terrible motorcycle accident back when he was 20. He tells me he keeps it in a jar, but did not bring it to dinner. Hitoshi had to get on with his life as an engineer with just 9 fingers. He was telling me last night that he quickly became left hand dominant and when he became proficient coding with nine fingers and a left hand mouse wizard, his creative talent exploded. Not so for me, my trading has gotten worse and I veer right all day!!

Back to the Alpaca story…

The company is growing incredibly fast as AI proliferates. This growth is on top of their original fast growing core business powering brokerages around the globe. As Open Claw and Claude Code grow, so grows agentic and API trading and so grows Alpaca. For now, I call it the ‘open claw, claude code, mac mini, agentic hedge fund era - powered by Alpaca. Back in the 1990’s, Intel had an incredible marketing campaign to bring attention to their products that powered all the Microsoft, Dell, Gateway and Compaq computers - called ‘Intel Inside’. Alpaca is no different …it being the API”s that connect all the hardware and AI to the actual trade.

Here is just one example of how this is exciting. Leo, the Stocktwits CTO built a product called Portfolio Genius (by himself). He created a ‘Howard Portfolio’ that tracks my feed on Stocktwits and places trades. What I most love about this future is people can opt in or out on both ends of this marketplace. I don’t want to charge for my ideas and I don’t want the responsibility of telling people what and when to buy and sell. The AI and Alpaca do all of this quietly behind the scenes.

I am very confident that Alpaca, Etoro and Robinhood will continue to be huge winners of this of this agentic era of investing and trading. I am getting more excited everyday for Stocktwits sitting in the middle of this huge trend.

Way back in 2010 when we invested in Etoro, I was excited about Yoni’s vision for copy trading. Copy trading has been an idea ahead of it’s time. That time is now and being an open platform like Stocktwits is an interesting and exciting place to be as agentic trading and AI proliferate.

Have a good day…