Getting started

Your account starts on the paper account: real prices, practice money, and no brokerage to set up. Nothing you do in these four steps can place a real order, and switching that on later takes several separate, deliberate settings. So there’s no way to get this wrong expensively — the worst case is a strategy that does nothing, and that’s fixable in a minute.

Here’s the whole thing, in the order it has to happen.

1. Look at the paper account

There’s nothing to connect. Your account came with $10,000 of practice money in a simulated brokerage account, and it’s already pointed at the same live quotes your strategies will read. The short checklist on Trading says what’s left to do, and it’s two things.

If you’d rather start with a different amount — the amount you’d actually trade with is the honest choice — that’s Starting cash under Settings, and a reset puts the account back to it.

2. Switch on a strategy

A strategy is a rule for when to buy and when to sell. Your account came with three, so you don’t have to write one: a Trend follower, a Dip buyer and a Breakout. Each is written out in full with a comment on every line saying what it means for the trade — worth reading once, even if you don’t read code.

Pick one. The trend follower is the gentlest to start with, because it trades least. Then two things, both on the Strategies screen:

• Give it money to work with. Every strategy gets a slice of your account, and a strategy with no slice will keep finding trades it can’t take — which looks exactly like a strategy that never finds anything. Say 25%. On $10,000 that’s $2,500 for this one rule.
• Switch it on. Open the strategy and activate it from its last stage. It’s a draft until you do, and a draft trades nothing.

Leave the other two alone for now. Two or three strategies you understand beat eight you don’t, and one is plenty for the first fortnight.

3. Start the engine

The engine is the thing that runs your strategies. It looks at every stock on your watchlist, every few seconds, and asks each active strategy “buy, sell, or nothing?”

Start it from the chip in the header. Two things worth knowing before you do:

• Signing out doesn’t stop it. It runs on the server, on your account only, until you halt it. That’s the point — it works while you’re not watching — but it surprises people.
• It starts in “ask me first” mode. It’ll find a trade and wait for you to approve it. Leave it that way until you’ve seen a few.

4. Approve the first signal

Now you wait. Depending on the market, the first signal may come in ten minutes or in three days — the trend follower only buys when a stock has been rising for a while, and on a flat week that’s nobody. A quiet engine isn’t a broken one; click any stock on your watchlist and its page shows every look the engine took at it and why it passed.

When a signal arrives, a needs you bar appears on Trading: the stock, the strategy that wants it, and the reason, in the strategy’s own words. Approve it, and a paper order fills at the ask plus a little slippage. Within a few seconds you’ll have a position — say 12 shares of AAPL at $208.50 — with a protective stop already resting 3% below, at $202.25, so the most that position can cost you is about $75.

Ignore a signal and it expires on its own. Nothing happens unless you say so.

Reading the result

Trading now shows you what you hold, what it’s worth right now, and whether it’s protected. The big number at the top is today’s result. It’s the one to glance at each morning; everything else on the page explains it.

The strategy will sell when its rule says to — for the trend follower, when the price drops back below its one-month average. That might be tomorrow or in three weeks. When it does, the trade moves to Review, where you can see what it made or lost and read the whole story of it: the signal, your approval, the fill, the exit.

What to do for the next two weeks

Nothing, mostly. Let it trade. Paper trading is the only test of a strategy that can’t be fooled, and it needs time: thirty trades is a reasonable minimum before the numbers mean much, and the trend follower will take a while to get there.

Three things are worth doing in the meantime:

• Read a few of the passes once a day. Not the trades — the decisions not to trade, on a stock’s own page. Seeing why it didn’t buy something is how the rule stops being a black box.
• Change one thing, on a copy. Curious what happens with a 5% stop instead of 3%? Edit the strategy, save it as a new version, and compare. Version 1 is always there to go back to.
• Notice how the losing days feel. There’ll be one. Finding out now, for free, that you want to switch everything off when it’s down 1% is the most useful thing paper trading can tell you.

And a brokerage, later

When a strategy has earned it, connect a brokerage under Settings — a Tradier sandbox token first, which rehearses the connection with Tradier’s own practice money — and switch the account to it. Your strategies and their track record come with you; only where the orders go changes. Real money is a further, separate switch, and there’s no rush to reach it.

When something on a screen doesn’t make sense, the ? button explains the screen you’re on, and the walkthrough under it takes five minutes. Neither can place a trade.