Accounts and credentials

Open Accounts in the activity bar. Each vendor is a row: what it needs from you, whether it has it, and what it gives back (bars, quotes, holdings, option quotes).

Vendor	Credential	Gives	Notes
Alpaca	an API key pair, typed once	bars (IEX free, SIP paid), option quotes, holdings, paper and live trading, streamed bars	Paper and live are two sub-accounts with two key pairs from one login. Bars come from whichever pair exists, paper preferred
Robinhood	sign in (OAuth)	bars, quotes, holdings, option quotes	A login holds more than one account; a session names the one it trades by its last four digits
Yahoo Finance	none	bars, dividends, the live price stream	Runs as a provider process (arvo-plugin-yahoo). No key, no sign-in, and therefore no order

Credentials go into the operating system's keychain and nowhere else. A provider never receives a whole credential: each call carries a grant for that call. An agent never receives any: the research API has no call that touches one.

Alpaca

Create a key pair in the Alpaca dashboard (paper keys from the paper dashboard, live keys from the live one) and paste them in Accounts → Alpaca. For a headless machine the engine also reads APCA_API_KEY_ID and APCA_API_SECRET_KEY from the environment, keychain first.

Robinhood

Accounts → Robinhood → Sign in opens the vendor's login in your browser; Arvo keeps the session token. An expired session shows as a problem on the dashboard and in the Operations view, and raises an alert.

What "connected" means

A vendor is connected when its credential is there and usable. The status bar counts them (Accounts 2/2); the Operations view lists them with their sub-accounts. A vendor needing nothing is always connected.