Paper Trading

if you wish to test bot functionality or settings without committing real money, you can run a paper bot first paper bots have all of the same functionality as live bots, but paper bots will not execute real trades in your brokerage account instead, they will create paper trades in your whispertrades account and manage and track them as if they were live not intended to reflect a live market while the ultimate goal is for paper trading to resemble a live market and performance, we don't have enough data or simulations to say that our paper bots show realistic fills we'll continue to monitor and tweak paper bots in hopes to achieve this goal, but for the time being, paper results should not be taken seriously or used for forward testing instead, the purpose of paper bots is to test bot logic and configuration backtesting is the best approach for testing strategy performance getting started with paper trading step 1 add a paper brokerage account visit your brokers page and click add new at the top of the page to add a new connection from there, select "paper" and then specify a starting balance all paper bots are associated with a paper brokerage account that you create at whispertrades you can create as many paper accounts as you would like step 2 add a new bot visit your bot list and click create bot at the top of the page to add a new bot from there, select your paper account in the broker connection dropdown and fill all other bot settings out as you wish rather than creating a new bot, you can also clone an existing bot if you have one with similar settings that you're looking for if you clone an existing bot, be sure to edit the bot and change the brokerage connection if it is associated with a different live or paper account step 3 enable the bot once your paper bot is saved and configured, simply enable it from the bot overview screen once you do, it'll start running like a live bot but only log paper trades inside of your whispertrades account step 4 going live (optional) if you want to convert your paper bot to a live bot, you can simply disable the bot and change the broker connection however, due to potential confusion or overlap between paper and live trades in reporting, it is generally a better idea to clone the paper bot into a new, live bot this will maintain a clearer separation between paper and live performance separation in reporting is described below paper bot charges all paper bots are charged at 50% of your current bot rate, regardless of whether or not the paper bot currently has an open position as with live bots, a paper bot will not incur charges while it is disabled paper account buying power if a bot tries to submit an order in a live brokerage account, and the account does not have sufficient buying power, your broker will reject the order paper accounts at whispertrades do not have or enforce buying power requirements, so a paper account will accept any new order that is sent, even though that order might be rejected in a live brokerage account position history and performance monitoring there are some important things to keep in mind while you paper trade regarding how these trades are recorded and how they may impact live bot statistics paper trades are recorded at whispertrades only paper bot trades are only recorded on the whispertrades platform and will not show up in your broker's platform if your broker supports paper trading paper trades will not show up in account performance stats/charts paper bot trades will not show up in the following locations dashboard charts dashboard performance metrics at the top of the page (ie profit today, profit wtd, net liquidation value, notional held, etc ) performance page bot reports bot stats are based on current live vs paper bot type bot stats, such as total trades, win rate, return, and drawdown are calculated based on the current state (live vs paper) of the bot if a bot is configured as a paper bot, its stats will reflect all prior paper trades if you change that bot to a live bot, the stats will then reflect live trades, but not paper trades