CELESYS LEARNING / EDUCATIONAL

A practical paper-trading checklist

Practice a repeatable research and risk-review process, and understand the limits of simulated fills.

Paper trading helps you practice a process without sending real orders. It cannot establish that you will achieve the same fills or results with real capital. Use it to find mistakes in your workflow and to record decisions consistently.

Before recording an idea

Write down the instrument, market, time horizon, evidence timestamp and reason for the idea. Identify what would invalidate the reasoning. Separate observations from assumptions, and explicitly list any missing earnings, economic-event or options data.

Plan the downside

For a stock simulation, compare entry and invalidation levels and calculate the modeled loss per share. A stop is not a guarantee: gaps, liquidity and execution delays can make actual losses larger. Do not transfer underlying-price risk calculations directly to an option premium.

Record realistic costs

Include commissions, spreads and slippage assumptions. Celesys's Trading Desk uses simplified stock/ETF paper fills. Its journal is browser-local, and automatic observations only happen while the desk is running and scanning the relevant symbol. Export the journal if you want to retain it outside that browser.

Review the process as well as the outcome

Ask whether the evidence was available at the decision time, whether you followed your own rules, and whether a result depended on a favorable fill assumption. Track losses and periods without trades alongside winners. A short profitable sample is not a calibrated win probability.

Know the workspace's limits

The desk does not send broker orders. Its stock paper journal does not simulate option fills. Research checks are deterministic rules, and the strategy has no independently audited out-of-sample performance. A WAIT result is a valid outcome when evidence is incomplete.

Open the paper-trading desk · Read the data and methodology notes

Explore the India chain or US chain. Data availability is shown in the workspace.