Press release — Newsroom

Dolphin Trade Pro and Alpaca Securities LLC announce an embedded-finance clearing and custody partnership

Brokerage onboarding, order execution, clearing and custody for Dolphin Trade Pro clients are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC, a US self-clearing broker-dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC, under its Broker API.

Press release August 18, 2025 New York Clearing & custody

NEW YORK — August 18, 2025 — Dolphin Trade Pro, the artificial-intelligence-assisted platform for US equity investing, today announced a strategic embedded-finance partnership with Alpaca Securities LLC (“Alpaca Securities”), the US self-clearing broker-dealer. Under the arrangement, every part of the client journey that touches money or securities — brokerage account opening, order routing and execution, clearing and settlement, custody, and account statements — is carried out by Alpaca Securities through its Broker API.

Dolphin Trade Pro supplies the client-facing layer: the research and signal engine, the portfolio construction and automatic rebalancing tools, and the account experience. The company is a financial technology provider, not a broker-dealer, and it does not hold or commingle client cash or securities at any point.

For clients, the practical effect is that the regulated half of the relationship is documented, disclosed and carried by a broker-dealer, while the platform concentrates on research, tooling and usability. The technical and regulatory detail of the arrangement is set out on our partnership page, and the broker-dealer's credentials are listed on the compliance page.

What the agreement covers

  • Account opening and onboarding. Securities accounts are opened with Alpaca Securities, including identity verification and the broker-dealer's own customer agreements and disclosures.
  • Order routing and execution. Orders for US-listed equities and exchange-traded funds are submitted through the Broker API and executed by the broker-dealer.
  • Clearing and settlement. Trade clearing, settlement, corporate actions and the associated tax reporting sit with Alpaca Securities as a self-clearing broker-dealer.
  • Custody. Client securities and cash are held in the client's own brokerage account at Alpaca Securities, segregated from platform funds.
  • Records and statements. Confirms, statements and account records are issued by the broker-dealer.
  • Fractional execution. Orders can be placed as a dollar amount rather than a share count, from USD 1 per order, which is what makes dollar-amount investing and automatic rebalancing practical in a retail account.

Nothing in the arrangement changes who provides investment technology. Dolphin Trade Pro remains the platform layer; Alpaca Securities remains the broker-dealer that opens the account, executes the order, clears the trade and holds the assets.

Strategic highlights

Four things this partnership changes

Highlight 01 — Institutional clearing

Execution, clearing and custody at a US broker-dealer

Alpaca Securities LLC is registered with the SEC, is a FINRA member firm (CRD# 288202) and a member of SIPC. It is a self-clearing broker-dealer and a member of DTCC, OCC and FICC. See the regulatory credentials.

Highlight 02 — Asset protection

SIPC protection up to $500,000, plus Excess SIPC cover

Accounts carried by Alpaca Securities receive SIPC protection of up to $500,000 per account, including up to $250,000 for cash claims. Alpaca additionally carries Excess SIPC commercial insurance placed with Lloyd's of London, which its published disclosures describe as providing up to $75 million for securities and $75 million for cash per client. SIPC and Excess SIPC address the failure of a broker-dealer and missing assets; they do not protect against market losses.

Highlight 03 — Advisory oversight

Macro strategy and clearing-operations oversight

The integration runs alongside two advisory engagements: Julian V. Sterling on macro strategy and risk modelling, and Chloe Chen as principal operational liaison for clearing and compliance. Read the mandate disclosures.

Highlight 04 — Fractional shares

Dollar-amount investing from USD 1

Through the Broker API, clients can invest a chosen dollar amount into higher-priced US stocks and ETFs instead of buying whole shares, and can run a rebalancing portfolio across several positions. Fractional availability depends on the instrument and on the broker-dealer's capabilities. See how the platform works.

Executive comment

“Retail investors have long been asked to choose between a simple experience and a properly supervised one. Alpaca Securities gives us the regulated core — account opening, execution, clearing and custody at a US broker-dealer — so that we can concentrate on the part clients actually see: research, portfolio construction and an order flow that is easy to understand.”

Global Chief Operating Officer, Dolphin Trade Pro
Role clarity

Who does what, in writing

Alpaca Securities LLC

Broker-dealer, clearing and custody

Opens and carries the client's securities account, executes orders, clears and settles trades, holds client securities and cash, issues confirms and statements, and provides the SIPC and Excess SIPC protections described above. It is responsible for the client relationship under US securities rules.

Dolphin Trade Pro

Technology and portfolio tooling

Provides the platform, the research and signal engine, and the portfolio construction and rebalancing tools. It is not a broker-dealer, does not hold or commingle client cash or securities, does not take discretionary control of client accounts and does not provide personalised investment advice.

Protection and its limits

SIPC protection of up to $500,000 per account, including up to $250,000 for cash claims, applies to accounts carried by Alpaca Securities LLC if the broker-dealer fails and customer assets are missing. Excess SIPC insurance is carried by Alpaca Securities LLC and placed with Lloyd's of London. Neither SIPC nor Excess SIPC protects against market losses: the value of an investment can fall as well as rise, and clients can lose the amount invested.

Advisory appointments: macro strategy and clearing operations

Related correspondence — The letter confirming these appointments is published in full on our leadership page.

In that correspondence, Sterling-Cross Family Office & Associates (Compliance & External Relations Division, 55 Hudson Yards, New York, NY 10001) wrote to the board of Dolphin Trade Pro to confirm the appointment of Professor Julian V. Sterling as Chief Financial Advisor and Ms. Chloe Chen, MFE as Principal Operational Liaison. The letter states that the appointments follow a cross-border operational review of the platform's technical and compliance architecture, including its integration with Alpaca Securities LLC as the underlying clearing, execution and custody broker-dealer.

The engagement, as set out in that correspondence, covers three mandates:

  1. Macro strategy steering. Oversight of the macroeconomic framework and the behavioural-finance inputs used by the platform's signal engine.
  2. Regulatory and clearing alignment. Direct oversight of the API bridge between the platform and Alpaca Securities LLC, so that order flow is processed through regulated channels and exceptions are escalated in writing.
  3. Institutional custody confirmation. Written confirmation that retail client assets are segregated and routed through Alpaca Securities LLC, and therefore sit within standard SIPC protection and the Excess SIPC commercial insurance limits carried by the broker-dealer.
The advisors

Mandates and responsibilities

Julian V. Sterling

Julian V. Sterling

Chief Financial Advisor — Macro Strategy & Risk Modelling

Julian V. Sterling is a Wall Street economist and quantitative hedge-fund pioneer who advises Dolphin Trade Pro as its Global Strategic Advisor and Chief Macro Strategist. He is also an invited Senior Research Fellow in Behavioural Finance at the NYU Stern School of Business and Chief Investment Officer of Sterling-Cross Family Office & Associates.

He holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton University and an MBA from the Wharton School. Across a Wall Street career of almost three decades he served as a core risk officer in the Fixed Income Division of Goldman Sachs and as a Managing Director in Morgan Stanley's Asia-Pacific and emerging-markets multi-asset strategy group. He led institutional mandates in the tens of billions of dollars through both the 2000 dot-com collapse and the 2008 subprime crisis, and his record of anticipating black-swan events earned him the industry nickname “Wall Street's number-one downside risk controller”.

Since stepping back from the bulge-bracket trading floor, Professor Sterling has worked on combining behavioural finance with leading AI algorithms. He is also a fiduciary to several private family offices and university endowments and is bound by US Securities and Exchange Commission anti-front-running rules and by confidentiality agreements; he therefore maintains a deliberately minimal public digital footprint, and his research circulates inside top-tier Wall Street institutions and reaches the platform as private-label whitepapers.

His mandate covers the macroeconomic framework and the risk-overlay logic applied to the platform's signal engine: market-regime analysis, drawdown and tail-risk controls, and the translation of behavioural-finance research into the rule-based allocation parameters used by the product team. He is responsible for the top-level macro logic behind the platform's AI signal streams, and he brings an institutional-grade investment perspective to retail investors. The engagement is delivered through Sterling-Cross Family Office & Associates under a private consulting agreement. Mr. Sterling does not participate in client onboarding, order handling, client fund custody or the solicitation of investors.

Chloe Chen

Chloe Chen, MFE

Principal Operational Liaison — Clearing & Compliance

Chloe Chen is Dolphin Trade Pro's Principal Operational Liaison for clearing and compliance and heads the platform's global clearing and compliance execution. She is also Chief Operating Officer and partner at Sterling-Cross Family Office & Associates.

She comes from a financial family and holds a Master of Science in Financial Engineering from Columbia University, having graduated with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley with a double bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and economics. Before joining Professor Sterling's team she worked as an asset analyst in the Blackstone asset-management group and then spent several years in risk management at BlackRock, where she was part of the core operations group for Aladdin, the firm's risk-control system. That work gave her a detailed grounding in the underlying trade logic and global compliance architecture of large securities platforms.

Within the Dolphin Trade Pro team she holds the “execution brain” role: she is responsible for turning Professor Sterling's top-level macro strategy into executable production code, and for personally supervising the platform's API integration with Alpaca Securities LLC. Her remit covers Broker API integration management, pre-trade control design, order-routing controls, reconciliation procedures, exception handling, records retention and internal control review.

Ms. Chen and her compliance team are responsible for keeping every trade — and every fractional-share movement — on the platform inside the US Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA framework. Securities brokerage services, order execution, clearing and custody are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC; her team owns the operational interface on the platform side and acts as the point of contact for compliance and regulatory questions relating to the integration.

About Dolphin Trade Pro

Dolphin Trade Pro INC is a financial technology company registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) as a Money Services Business (registration no. 31000312649075). The company builds AI-assisted tools for investing in US-listed securities: signal research, portfolio construction, automatic rebalancing and dollar-amount investing from USD 1. Brokerage services, order execution, clearing and custody are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC. Dolphin Trade Pro is not a broker-dealer and does not hold client assets. More: company overview.

About Alpaca Securities LLC

Alpaca Securities LLC (doing business as Alpaca Clearing) is a US broker-dealer registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a member of FINRA (CRD# 288202) and a member of SIPC, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of AlpacaDB, Inc. It provides API-first brokerage infrastructure — account opening, order execution, clearing and custody — to fintech platforms, digital wallets and wealth-management products. Securities brokerage services are provided by Alpaca Clearing, member FINRA/SIPC. Its own disclosures govern the client relationship.

— ENDS —

Media relations pr@dolphintradepro.com

Interview requests, comment on this announcement and republication enquiries. Please include your outlet, the angle and your deadline.

Compliance & regulatory compliance@dolphintradepro.com

Verification of our registrations, clearing arrangements and disclosure questions from regulators, auditors or institutional counterparties.

A note on what this release is

This release describes a commercial technology and clearing relationship and our own registrations. Nothing in it is investment, legal or tax advice, or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security, and nothing in it is a forecast or a promise of performance. Investing in securities involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.

Ready to see how the platform works?

Securities accounts are opened with, and carried by, Alpaca Securities LLC, member FINRA/SIPC. Dolphin Trade Pro provides the technology, the signal engine and the portfolio tools.

Open an Account Back to the newsroom