Practice mode (paper trading)
Test ideas with a full paper account: realistic fills, balances, risk limits, history and a performance dashboard.
4 min readFull guide (PDF)
Practice mode lives under the Trade group in the sidebar. It's a complete paper-trading account, kept entirely separate from your real brokerage, so you can prove a process before real money touches it.
- Configurable fill simulator so fills behave like a real book instead of always filling at the mid.
- Paper balances, buying power and risk limits you can set for yourself.
- Full paper trade history with every order and its outcome.
- A performance dashboard showing win rate, average win/loss, drawdown and equity curve.
The most useful way to use practice mode is to run the same idea in paper for a few weeks before sizing it live — the performance dashboard makes it obvious whether the edge is real or a story.
Related guides
- The live trade deskEnable trading on a linked account, place stock and ETF orders, and understand every order status.
- The options chain and options ordersFilter strikes and expiries, read the Greeks, use keyboard navigation and place single-leg options orders.
- Risk Lab, correlation, stress tests and the Tax CenterThe analysis suite: correlation heatmaps, drawdown scenarios, hedge ideas, tax-loss harvesting and club consensus.
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