Paper trading that teaches you something

Editorial desk: Jordan Kessler · September 29, 2026

Paper trading means placing simulated trades with pretend money and real prices. It costs nothing, and it's the safest place to learn a platform. It also builds bad habits if you treat the pretend money as pretend. Here's how to make practice resemble the real thing.

Where to paper trade

Several platforms in our rankings have free practice options. TC2000 offers an unlimited free practice account with a chart, positions, an option chain and a journal, and no credit card is needed. cTrader brokers provide demo accounts, with terms that vary by broker. MotiveWave has a 14-day trial with no credit card and a free Community edition afterwards. Your own broker may offer a simulator too, which has the advantage of the same order ticket you'll use live. Pick the one you're most likely to keep using once real money is involved.

Set the balance you'll really use

If you plan to start with $5,000, set the practice account to $5,000, not the large default many simulators use. Position size, the sting of a loss and the urge to overtrade all depend on the balance. A $500 loss means something on a $5,000 account. On $100,000 it barely registers, and you learn nothing from it. Match the instruments too: if you'll trade TSX stocks, don't practise only on large US tech names.

Include costs and realistic fills

Simulators often fill every order at exactly the price you wanted. Real markets don't. Add your broker's commission to each trade in your journal, and assume some slippage on market orders, more on thinly traded TSX-V names. If a strategy only works with perfect fills, it doesn't work. Our backtesting guide covers the same problem from the testing side.

Keep a journal from day one

Record the setup, entry, exit, size and reason for every trade, and add one line on how you felt. TC2000's practice account has a journal built in; a spreadsheet works fine anywhere else. Review it every Friday, ideally with the charts of that week's trades open beside it. Patterns show up quickly: trades taken out of boredom, stops moved at the last minute, winners closed too early.

Know when to move on

Set a clear test before you start. For instance: 50 trades that follow your written rules, with a positive result after costs. Once you pass it, move to real money at a small size. Paper results won't match live results, mostly because real money changes how people behave. Starting small gives you room to adjust while mistakes are cheap. A sensible first live size is one you could lose in full without changing any of your plans.

Common mistakes

• Trading far more often than you would with your own money.
• Shrugging off losses because "it's only paper".
• Switching strategies every few days, so nothing gets a fair test.
• Practising on a platform you won't use live. The order ticket and hotkeys matter more than people expect.
• Resetting the account after a bad week, which wipes out the lesson.

A four-week plan

Week one: learn the platform, set up your watchlist and place small test orders of each type. Weeks two and three: trade your written plan and journal every trade. Week four: review the journal, calculate results after costs and decide whether to keep going, change the plan or move to a small live account.

Paper trading won't make anyone profitable on its own, and real trading carries a high risk of loss. Used well, it's a cheap way to learn a platform and test your discipline. Compare practice options in our platform rankings.