1. Paper Trading Overview

Paper trading lets you practise taking trades on the real chart feed without risking money. You place market, limit, stop, and stop-limit orders, attach take-profit and stop-loss brackets, and watch positions mark to market against the same prices the chart is streaming — with an Account Manager that tracks balance, equity, P&L, and performance using the same definitions as the Strategy Tester.

This is a simulation. Fractal Chart is not a broker and never connects to one. Orders are filled by a matching engine that runs in your browser against the chart's own price feed, following TradingView Paper Trading conventions. Simulated fills ignore real-world liquidity, queue position, and partial fills, and a delayed or idle feed produces prices no real venue would have given you. No real money is involved. See the Risk Disclosure.

What you get

Opening the trading surfaces

The toolbar gains two buttons beside the alerts bell:

• Trading panel (the ⇄ icon) toggles the on-chart Buy/Sell strip for the active pane. Shortcut: ⌥P.
• Account Manager (the wallet icon) opens the bottom dock; it shows an amber dot while you hold a position. You can also launch the workspace straight into it with /chart/BTCUSDT?panel=paper-trading.

While the trading panel is visible, ⇧B and ⇧S prepare a market buy or sell for the quantity shown — placed at once when one-click trading is on, otherwise in the prefilled order ticket. The shortcuts are inert when the panel is hidden, so you cannot trade by accident from the keyboard. Everything else — the ticket, the right-click Trade group, the price-scale + items, and the line buttons — is covered in Placing Orders.

What you can trade

Paper trading rides on the chart's live data, so it works wherever the chart streams:

Instruments are identified by provider, asset class, and ticker, exactly like alerts, so BTCUSDT on Binance and BTC-USDT on OKX are separate positions. Price and quantity steps come from the exchange where available (tick size and lot step for Binance, OKX, and Kraken; round lots for Massive) and fall back to the chart's price precision otherwise.

How fills work, in one paragraph

The engine consumes the price updates the chart already receives — it opens no extra connections. A market order fills immediately at the ask (buy) or bid (sell) quoted when you place it — else at the last price — plus any slippage you configure. A limit fills at its own price once the market reaches it; a stop triggers on the last price and fills as a market order; a stop-limit becomes a working limit when triggered. Take-profit and stop-loss brackets are real child orders that activate when their parent fills and cancel each other (one fills, the other goes). When there is no tick feed, or during replay, each bar is walked open → nearer extreme → farther extreme → close so levels inside the bar fill at their own price rather than at the close. The full rules, with a table, are in Positions, Brackets & Fills.

Two consequences are worth knowing up front:

• Orders only fill while their chart is open. A symbol that is not on any pane receives no prices, so its working orders wait and its position stops updating until you open that chart again. The Account Manager shows — for Last and P&L in the meantime.
• The browser tab must be open. Like alerts, the engine runs locally; nothing evaluates while the app is closed.

The account

Every browser starts with one Paper Trading account holding $100,000. Positions are netted — one position per symbol, with an average price when you add and first-in-first-out lots when you trim. Commission (per asset class), slippage, one-click trading, order confirmations, and a regular-session-only option for equities are all configurable, and Reset returns the account to its starting balance at any time, keeping the previous run as a read-only archived record. See Settings, Reset & Export.

There is no margin or leverage. Marked exposure from filled long and short positions consumes buying power, as does the opening portion of every working order. The broker tracks buy and sell reservations independently and checks capital again at the actual fill price, so opposite or repeated reducing orders cannot create free capacity.

When you run a bar replay, a separate Replay session account (named after the ticker and start time) is created automatically so practice trades on history never mix with the live paper account. See Paper Trading in Replay.

Where it is stored

Paper trading runs entirely in your browser. Orders, positions, history, the journal, and settings are saved in local storage on this device.

State persists across sessions but is not synced to a server or across devices, and is removed if you clear site data. Use Export / Import in the settings to move an account between browsers or keep a backup, and Export history CSV to analyse fills elsewhere. History keeps the newest 2,000 orders and 5,000 executions; older detail rows roll off while cumulative totals preserve lifetime performance continuity. Concurrent tabs merge independent account/settings changes by revision and report same-component conflicts instead of silently overwriting them.

Next steps

Place your first simulated order.

Next: Placing Orders