Paper Trading
Live signals, real market data, simulated money — the dress rehearsal between backtest and real orders.
What it means
Paper trading runs your strategy against the live market in real time, but fills are simulated and no real orders leave the machine. It tests everything a backtest cannot: live data quirks, timing, connectivity, and your own reaction to watching it run.
In TraderWe, paper mode logs into your real broker account for live data while keeping a virtual balance and simulating fills inside the app — so the data path is identical to real trading and the switch to live changes only whether orders are sent.
Why traders care
- Surfaces live-infrastructure issues no historical test can reveal.
- Builds trust in the automation loop before a dollar is exposed.
Related terms
Educational content, not investment advice. Engine details describe how TraderWe computes this value; other platforms may define it differently.