Charles Schwab Integration

Overview

The Trade Labs Charles Schwab integration runs your automated strategies on a real Schwab brokerage account, through Schwab's official Trader API. It trades stocks and single-leg options, driven by the same Discord, Telegram, TradingView, and cloud signals as every other broker Trade Labs supports.

Schwab asks every user to register their own developer app, so the account is linked with your own credentials and your own approval. Trade Labs never sees a Schwab password, and the tokens stay encrypted on your computer.

How it works

Connecting Schwab takes two steps, one at Schwab and one in the app:

1. Register an app at developer.schwab.com, selecting both Accounts and Trading and Market Data, and wait for it to reach Ready For Use
2. Paste the App Key, Secret, and Callback URL into the Schwab card in Trade Labs, then sign in through your own browser
3. Point a Stocks or Options strategy at the account and let Trade Labs place the trades

The full walkthrough, including the callback page that is supposed to fail to load, is in the Charles Schwab documentation.

Key Features

• Stocks and single-leg options, entered at market or at a limit priced off the bid, mid, or ask
• Stop loss, take profit, and trailing stops that rest at Schwab rather than in the app
• Extended-hours orders on both stocks and options
• Per-account routing across every brokerage account linked to your Schwab login
• Smart expiration detection and smart price override on options
• Credentials and tokens encrypted on your own machine, never on our servers

Good to know

• Schwab asks you to sign in again every 7 days. The clock starts at your first authorisation and it does not reset when the app renews itself in the background. This applies to every app built on Schwab's API.
• There is no paper trading on Schwab's API. The developer sandbox cannot place orders, and thinkorswim paperMoney is not reachable from the API. Rehearse a strategy on Tradier or Interactive Brokers instead.
• Multi-leg spreads are not offered yet. They need Level 2 options approval at Schwab, so Trade Labs leaves Schwab out of the Spreads picker rather than let an order fail in the middle of a signal.
• Futures are not possible. Schwab's Trader API has no futures order endpoint. Use Interactive Brokers for futures.