Paper trading basics
ON THIS PAGE
Every account starts in paper mode, and the Free tier stays there. Paper trading runs against your Alpaca paper account: real market data, simulated fills, zero dollars at risk.
The PAPER badge
The PAPER badge in the top bar is the environment indicator: it’s visible from every authenticated screen and flips to a pulsing LIVE (plus a striped top bar and an outline around the entire screen) only after the full enable-live ceremony. While the badge says PAPER, your trades and the automatic engine touch only the paper account. One deliberate exception once live keys are saved: the kill switch’s Liquidate and Cancel open sweep BOTH accounts — an emergency stop shouldn’t care which badge is showing, and it only ever cancels or sells, never buys.
What’s real, what’s simulated
| Real | Simulated |
|---|---|
| Market data, signal runs, rankings | Order fills (executed by Alpaca’s paper engine) |
| Order lifecycle, audit trail, reconciliation | Cash and buying power (paper balance) |
| Risk caps, kill switch, every safety control | Profit and loss |
The whole pipeline is identical: same signals, same caps, same reconciliation (the routine check that our records match the broker’s). That makes paper a faithful rehearsal of live, not a toy mode.