Paper Trading Simulator

Paper trading is placing trades with virtual money against real market prices, so you practice entries, exits and position sizing without risking capital. Brokers call it demo trading or simulated trading. The mechanics match a live account: you take a position, price moves, your balance changes. Nothing settles in cash.

This paper trading simulator runs in your browser with no account and no download. You fund a virtual balance, set what share of it each trade risks, and take 25 trades on anonymized historical price data. The ticker and dates stay hidden, so you trade the price structure in front of you rather than what you remember about the company.

One session is one account. Your balance carries from trade one through trade 25, so a losing run compounds the way it does on funded money.

The guide to what paper trading is covers how demo accounts differ across brokers. This page covers what happens to one balance across 25 trades.

A $500 loss is noise on a $100,000 paper account and 25% of a real $2,000 account. The dollar figure is identical. The trader holding the second position behaves nothing like the trader holding the first.

thinkorswim paperMoney pre-funds two virtual accounts with $100,000 each. Interactive Brokers starts its paper account at $1,000,000. If you plan to deposit $2,500 into a live account, every sizing habit you build on those balances belongs to money you do not have.

Run the arithmetic. On $100,000 with a 2% rule, each trade risks $2,000. On a real $2,500 account, 2% is $50. Three months of practice leaves you comfortable with position sizes 40 times larger than the ones you will place.

This simulator asks for the balance before the first chart and defaults to $2,000. Risk is a percentage of what the account holds at that moment, so trade 25 is sized off the 24 trades that came before it. Win six in a row and the dollar risk grows with the balance. Lose six and it shrinks.

The position size calculator runs the same arithmetic against a stop loss and a share price when you are ready to place a live order.

Set the virtual balance to the number on your bank transfer before you take a single trade.

1. Fund the simulator at your real deposit. If $2,500 is going into the live account, paper trade at $2,500.

2. Pick one risk percentage and hold it. 1% or 2% of the running balance, on every trade, for the whole session. Raising size after a loss is what drains accounts.

3. Take 25 trades before you judge the result. Five trades describe variance. A green session over five trades sits inside the range a coin flip produces.

4. Write down why you entered. Log the entry, the size, the exit and the reason before the result appears. A trading journal turns that into a two-minute habit.

5. Your result here is before costs. Spread and commission come off every live fill and this simulator charges neither. Knock those off before you decide the strategy works.

The results screen shows four numbers and one line. The line plots your account balance after every settled trade, from the amount you funded to whatever is left at trade 25.

Final balance is where the account ended. Compare it against the number you funded. Ending at $1,780 on a $2,000 start is a $220 loss whatever your win rate says.

Return is that same result as a percentage of the starting balance. It stays comparable when you rerun the session at $500 or at $10,000.

Max drawdown is the deepest peak-to-trough fall along the curve, marked as the shaded band on the chart. A session that finishes up 12% after a 40% drawdown took a path most funded accounts do not survive.

Peak balance is the highest point the account reached. A peak well above your final balance means you gave gains back, which is a separate problem from picking the wrong direction.

Two sessions can finish at the same balance with drawdowns 30 points apart.

Every fill in this simulator lands at the price on the chart. Live, three things move it.

Spread takes the first bite. You buy at the ask and sell at the bid, so a two-cent spread costs two cents a share before price moves at all. On 500 shares that is $10 a round trip, and 25 round trips make it $250.

Slippage takes the second. A market order in a fast tape fills a cent or two past the price you saw, and a stop loss triggered on a gap fills wherever the book reopens.

Queue priority takes the third. A limit order that touches your price without trading through it can go unfilled, because the orders resting ahead of yours absorb the volume. Simulators fill it every time.

The fourth cost does not show up on any fill. You watch a paper position go $300 red without a change in pulse. At $300 of your own money, you cut the trade at $80 and take the next setup at half size.

Twenty-five clean repetitions get the mechanics out of the way, so the only new thing on your first live trade is the money.

thinkorswim, Webull and Interactive Brokers all run free paper trading accounts, and all three want an account first.

Charles Schwab defaults thinkorswim paperMoney to a 20-minute data delay until you fund a live brokerage account, per Schwab's own guide to paper trading. Entries get practised on bars that are 20 minutes stale.

Interactive Brokers needs paid market data subscriptions before its paper account shows real-time prices, and IBKR's own comparison of paper and live trading lists the order types its simulator drops: VWAP, Auction, Request for Quote and Pegged to Market. Penny options are disabled there as well.

Webull runs paper trading contests with leaderboard rankings and cash prizes. FINRA's 2022 report on gamification covers what that structure does to trading behavior. Winning a volume-ranked contest takes position sizes that would end a real account inside a week.

This page needs no account and no download. The tradeoff is scope: no order routing, no level 2, no options chain. You get 25 trades on an anonymized historical sequence and an equity curve at the end.

The full comparison of the best day trading simulators covers where each platform's fill logic breaks down against a live order book.