glossary
The stage between a graded backtest and real money. The same code runs at every bar close on live prices, and you watch it decide in the open before you fund it.
Paper trading is the practice of running a trading strategy on live market prices with simulated funds instead of real money, recording every order and fill as if they had been executed. It is a forward test: it shows how a strategy behaves on data that did not exist when it was built, without financial risk. On OptAlgo, every hosted strategy and bot runs on paper before it can be switched live.
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That the code runs unattended, that signals arrive when the backtest says they should, that fills at live prices resemble the simulated ones, and that the drawdown is one you can sit through. It does not prove profitability; it adds weeks of unseen data.
The deployed strategy runs in a sandbox at every bar close. Paper fills use the live order book from the market-data service, so a market order is filled at a realistic price, not the last trade. Free plan: 200 paper trades a month.
My Bots and the connector's compare-with-backtest tool line up paper trades against the backtest's trades on the same bars, so a drift in entries or fills shows up early.
faq
Long enough to see dozens of trades and at least one drawdown. For a 4-hour strategy that is usually several weeks.
Yes. Chat connectors are paper-only; they can deploy, watch and send paper signals, never live orders.
50 backtest units a month on the Free plan.