The practice account
A paper account with $100,000 of pretend money. How orders fill, what is compared with what, and how it differs from real trading.
1 min read
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The practice account lets you try an idea and see how it would have gone, without real money. Every signed-in account gets one, free. It is kept apart from your real holdings and never mixes into your briefing or analytics.
The rules
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
| Starting cash | $100,000. |
| Order size | A number of shares or a dollar amount. Fractional shares to four decimal places. |
| Fill price | The latest stored daily close for the symbol. The trade record shows which session that price is from. |
| Fees | None. |
| Selling | You can sell what you hold. There is no short selling, margin or options. |
| Comparison | The same $100,000 put into SPY at the close on the day your account started, and held. |
| Reset | There is none. The account starts once and keeps its history. |
Reading the result
- Account value is cash plus each position at its latest close.
- Return is account value against $100,000.
- Against SPY is that return next to what the comparison line did over the same days.
- The trade log lists every fill with its price and the session date of that price.
How it differs from a real account
- Real orders fill at the price available when you place them, which moves. Here you always get the last close, even on a day when the stock opened far from it.
- There is no bid-ask spread, no commission and no tax.
- You cannot run out of liquidity. A $50,000 order in a thinly traded stock fills in full here and would not in a market.
- Paper losses do not feel like real ones. How you would behave with real money is not something this can test.
Read next
- What a backtest can and cannot tell youA backtest applies fixed rules to past prices. It is good at ruling ideas out and bad at promising anything. How to read ours.
- Running your own backtestGive the backtester tickers and weights and it returns the record against the S&P 500. What to enter, what you get back and the bias you bring with you.
- Position size calculatorHow many shares to buy so that being wrong costs a set amount. Enter your account, the risk you accept, your entry and your stop.
Something here wrong or unclear? Tell us. Informational only, not investment advice.