What Is a Brokerage API? How Trading Apps Talk to Your Broker

By Sam Davila on 2026-07-10 - 2 min read

A brokerage API is the official interface a broker publishes so that software can interact with your account: read positions and balances, stream quotes, and place or cancel orders. Every trading app that shows your portfolio or executes trades on your behalf is using one. Understanding roughly how they work makes you a sharper judge of which apps to trust.

What an API actually exposes

Brokerage APIs are organized into scopes, and an app only gets the scopes you approve:

  • Account data: positions, balances, order history. Read-only.
  • Market data: quotes, charts, sometimes news. Often read-only and rate-limited.
  • Trading: placing, modifying, and canceling orders. The sensitive one.

Notably absent from every mainstream retail brokerage API: moving money to an outside account. Withdrawals and transfers to third parties are deliberately not exposed, which is why a read-and-trade authorization cannot drain your account to someone else's bank.

How access is granted

Modern brokers use OAuth 2.0: you approve the app on the broker's own login page, and the broker hands the app a token limited to the scopes you approved. You can see and revoke these tokens in your broker's security settings at any time. Older or unofficial integrations instead ask for your username and password, which gives the app your entire account with no scope limits. That distinction, official API versus credential sharing, is the single most useful thing to check before connecting anything.

Why apps differ in speed and reliability

Each broker's API has different rate limits (how many requests per minute an app may make), different data freshness, and different order types exposed. When a multi-broker app shows one account updating faster than another, that is usually the brokers' APIs differing, not the app. Good apps smooth this over with streaming connections where available and clear staleness indicators where not.

Questions to ask about any app built on brokerage APIs

  • Does it use the broker's official API through OAuth, or does it ask for your password?
  • What scopes does it request? An app that only analyzes your portfolio has no business requesting trading permissions.
  • How does it store tokens, and is its infrastructure audited (SOC 2 or similar)?

Sentient Logic is built entirely on official brokerage APIs through OAuth 2.0, requests only the scopes each feature needs, and never sees your broker password. That is what makes connecting 13 brokers into one view possible without concentrating your credentials anywhere.

Educational content, not financial advice.