Paper Trading Without Fooling Yourself
Paper trading is the safest way to test a strategy and the easiest to do uselessly. Here's how to make a demo account tell you the truth.
Paper trading — running a strategy on live prices with fake money — is the bridge between a backtest and real risk. It's the stage where you find out whether an idea that looked good on history actually works when prices are moving in real time and you have to make decisions live. Done well, it's the cheapest tuition in trading. Done carelessly, it teaches you nothing or, worse, teaches you the wrong lesson and hands you false confidence. The difference is entirely in how you run it.
Why a backtest isn't enough
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