TD Ameritrade permissions explained

• July 7, 2020 - 00:00
• FAQ, Tech Talk

OptionRoller integrates with TD Ameritrade via a secured method. It is an industry standard protocol called “OAuth 2.0.” You will notice it is more secured and provide you the additional peace of mind, because OptionRoller does not ask you to provide your TD Ameritrade / thinkofswim login to us. Instead, OptionRoller temporarily sends you to TD Ameritrade, where you login there, and then you tell TD Ameritrade that it is okay to let OptionRoller access my account, for the sake of rendering the OptionRoller Dashboard.

In this blog post, we would like to explain the TD Ameritrade Authorization screen further, so you can understand the underlying technology and gain more confidence in using OptionRoller.

TD Ameritrade Authorization

There are several things to spot out when you arrive to this screen. First, you should see that TD Ameritrade is seeking your consent to grant access to OptionRoller. It is important that when you see this screen, you can see OptionRoller is the intended recipient.

Scope of Authorization

Next, you will see that as part of this consent, TD Ameritrade will allow OptionRoller to: a) Place trades, b) Display your balances, positions, and order status, and c) Move money. This is called the “scope” of the authorization.

As of the writing of this blog post, TD Ameritrade is exposing its API in such a way that they deem to be reasonable and secured to bundle the scopes like this. TD Ameritrade is the data provider and OptionRoller completely trusts that TD Ameritrade has done the due diligence to offer the API in this way. OptionRoller, being the API consumer, is complying with this “API contract” and integrates according to its contract.

OptionRoller is created to provide traders like you an easy-to-read profit and loss dashboard. We are in the business to do algorithmic trading. Therefore, even though TD Ameritrade has provided this level of access, OptionRoller will only need to retrieve your option trading transactions, so that we can do all the manual, tedious work for you and give you a simple P/L dashboard.

We can assure you that we have no desire to trade or make monetary transaction in our platform; because at the end, all transactions are traceable nowadays, and we truly believe we are responsible for our own actions.

OptionRoller is a platform being developed by a team of engineers specialized in cybersecurity. We take security measure and the safe-guarding of your information very seriously. We take pride in utilizing the industry standard user authentication, and leveraging the secured communication protocols, while providing you a user friendly P/L Dashboard. We have combined the best of both worlds!