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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.)
- Bot reports
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.