Paper trading
Run a strategy on live market data with simulated execution before any real money is involved.
How a strategy gets there
A strategy reaches paper trading when the pipeline promotes it after risk review, or when you promote one yourself from its strategy page or the paper page's Add strategy button. Any of your own strategies with a completed backtest, and any marketplace strategy you subscribe to, can be admitted. Each admission is recorded with the exact code it runs. Paper trading is unlimited on every plan.
Supported paper markets
Paper trading runs on Binance perpetuals, coin-margined futures and spot, Bybit, OKX, Hyperliquid perpetuals and spot, Deribit, US stocks and ETFs, and spot forex. Strategies on other stock markets, including Hong Kong and China A-shares, spot gold and prediction markets can be backtested but not paper traded.
Isolated live execution
Each paper strategy runs in its own isolated NautilusTrader node with a live data feed and a simulated exchange. Fills follow real quotes or real trades on the venue, fees are the same as in the backtest, and leverage is clamped to the venue cap. Strategies never share positions or state.
Parity with the backtest
Each strategy's paper trading is replayed against a backtest over the same bars about 90 seconds after every trade, and again in daily sweeps, and the difference is reported. A wide gap points at execution, data or restart issues rather than the strategy, and the page says which.
Owner controls
Pause refuses new entries while the strategy keeps managing its exits and stops; Resume lifts the pause. Stop closes the strategy's paper positions, and any live positions it mirrors, at market and ends it once it is flat. Delete removes a stopped, flat strategy from the list while its history is kept for track records.
Reading the paper page
Active strategies are listed as cards; opening one shows the same full page as a strategy page with live positions, equity, the optimiser search ranges and the source code. The parity section compares paper and backtest results side by side, and low-confidence strategies carry their label.
Session markets and restarts
Equity venues idle outside exchange hours and resume at the open; a stop held over the close fills at the open, as in the backtest. Restarts warm the strategy up from the catalogue before it trades again, and positions are not closed on a restart.
Portfolio analysis
The Portfolio page combines your promoted strategies into one portfolio using their backtest, paper or live history, weighted equally, by inverse volatility or by risk parity, with a correlation view. Strategies whose histories do not overlap are listed separately with the reason.
Sharing a track record
From the paper page you can publish a strategy's live track record to the marketplace, with an optional feed delay and an optional copy of the strategy for subscribers.