Anyone can paper trade profitably for a week. Keep your paper trades in their own SuperTrader portfolio, check them against five readiness criteria, and go live on evidence — not on one good week.
Paper portfolio
34-day journal · 31 trades
P&L calendar
Recent paper trades
The problem with typical paper trading
The readiness framework
We define "ready to go live" as meeting 5 specific, statistically grounded criteria. Not gut feeling. Not a profitable week. All 5.
Sustained above your target for 45+ days — not just a lucky 2 weeks. Short win streaks in calm markets don't prove anything. A 45-day minimum captures multiple market conditions.
50+ completed paper trades. With fewer trades, you can't distinguish skill from luck. 50 trades gives a statistically meaningful sample for win rate and expectancy calculations.
Never exceeded your planned max drawdown rule. If you've broken your own loss limit even once in paper trading, you'll break it again with real money — under more pressure.
Followed your written trading rules on 85%+ of trades. Mark each paper trade Followed plan, Deviated or No plan in the Reflect step, then count how often you followed it. This metric most predicts live trading success.
Month-over-month performance within 20% variance. No random outlier months inflating your average. Real edges are repeatable — random ones aren't.
Example: 34 days in
2 of 5 met in this example. Tick each one off yourself when your own stats get there.
Interactive demo
All data is simulated. Keep paper and live trades in separate portfolios, switch between them, or see both in All Portfolios.
Portfolio
Paper vs live, side by side
Each column comes from that portfolio's own Analytics, for the same month.
What makes it different
Real trading has slippage. Log each paper fill at the price you'd realistically get — a tick or two worse on futures, a few cents on stocks — so your paper results actually predict your live performance.
A profitable week means nothing. The P&L calendar and Analytics show your paper results by day, week and month, so you can see whether your edge holds across 30, 60, and 90 days before you call yourself ready.
Write your trading rules in your trading plan. In the Reflect step, mark each paper trade Followed plan, Deviated or No plan — and keep an eye on your adherence rate, the metric that most predicts live trading success.
When you go live, your paper portfolio doesn't disappear. It becomes your baseline. Switch between your paper and live portfolios to compare win rate, P&L and profit factor and see if live execution matches your planning.
Run the Go-Live Checklist against your paper portfolio: win rate, trade count and P&L come from Analytics, your followed-plan rate from the Reflect step, and your month-by-month results from the P&L calendar. When every criterion is green, you're ready.
The criteria aren't arbitrary. They're designed to ensure your edge is real, repeatable, and validated across enough market conditions to survive real-money trading.
Go-live readiness — 34 days tracked
Tick a criterion when your own stats meet it.
Criteria met
2 of 5
3 still to check · Keep going
P&L calendar · first month live
After you go live, compare your live portfolio with your paper portfolio — win rate, profit factor and P&L in Analytics. The gap between them reveals whether you have a strategy problem or an execution problem.
Gap in paper too?
Your strategy needs work — the underperformance isn't just execution. Review your setup criteria.
Gap only in live?
Your strategy is sound. The gap is pure execution — emotions, hesitation, or premature exits under real-money pressure.
Who it's for
Just learning to trade, building a strategy, not ready to risk real money yet. SuperTrader gives you a structured environment to develop good habits before real stakes — with a clear checklist for when you're actually ready.
Building a specific trading system (breakout strategy, mean-reversion, etc.) and need to validate it in paper before committing capital. SuperTrader gives you the performance metrics to make an evidence-based go/no-go decision.
Experienced traders who lost money and are rebuilding confidence. The 5-point readiness checklist provides an objective re-entry gate — removing the emotional 'I think I'm ready' bias that caused losses in the first place.
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FAQ
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When you're ready to go live: