Paper trading app: how to practice trading without real money

A paper trading app lets you place simulated trades at live or simulated market prices with virtual money, so nothing you do can lose real cash. It is a safe way to learn how orders, position sizes and fees work before you risk a cent. You do not even need an app: a spreadsheet and public prices are enough. This guide explains what a simulator does, how two well-known ones work, how to paper trade with no account at all, what a simulation cannot teach you and what to check before real money is involved. If you are new to the topic, start with our beginner's guide to trading.

What a paper trading app does

A paper trading app places pretend orders against live or near-live prices and keeps track of a virtual balance. The name comes from traders who once wrote their trades down on paper to see how they would have performed. Webull's help center describes its version as a simulated experience in which "all transactions and funds are not real".

A simulator teaches you the mechanics: how to enter a buy or sell order, how a position changes your balance and how a loss looks on screen. It does not tell you whether you will make money with real funds.

How the well-known paper trading apps work

Webull and Schwab's thinkorswim are used here as examples only. This page does not rank them, link to them or suggest you sign up. Do not choose a broker because of its simulator; choose it, if at all, on licence, fees and custody. Features change over time and can differ by account, platform and country, so check the provider's current help pages.

Webull paper trading

Webull paper trading is described in Webull's help center as a simulated account where funds and transactions are not real. As of November 2026, the help center lists stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, futures and event contracts as supported assets. Webull also documents a "Reset Paper Account" option that clears your positions, orders and results so you can start again. We do not state a starting balance here because the US figure is not confirmed.

Thinkorswim paper trading

Thinkorswim paper trading runs through paperMoney, Schwab's simulated account. Schwab's paperMoney pages describe an account funded with $100,000 of simulated money and running on simulated market data. People who are not Schwab clients can use a free 30-day Guest Pass. After the 30 days the credentials expire and the data is no longer accessible. The simulator covers equities, options, futures and forex.

What to check before you download one

A simulator should not cost you anything, including your privacy. Ask these questions first:

• Does it ask for personal data or an ID document just to practice?
• Does it push you to fund a live account while you are still learning?
• Does it simulate trading fees, or does every trade look free?
• Does it offer leveraged products you would never trade with real money?

If the answer to the first two is yes, you are being signed up as a customer, not only given a practice tool. Read the privacy terms and decide whether that is what you want.

How to paper trade with no app at all

For many beginners, especially those curious about crypto, a spreadsheet is a simple place to start. A file saved on your own device needs no broker account and shares nothing with a trading app. Follow these steps:

1. Pick one asset and a virtual balance you could realistically afford to put in. If you would never invest $50,000, do not practice with $50,000.
2. Log every trade with the date, entry price, size, your reason for entering and your exit price.
3. Subtract an estimated fee on every buy and every sell, so your results are not flattered.
4. Set a maximum loss per trade before you enter, and write it down.
5. Review your log every week and look for rules you broke, not only for profit.

Use prices from a public chart or from the market data pages many sites publish for free. The point is the habit of recording and reviewing, not the tool.

What paper trading cannot teach you

Four things are missing from any simulation.

• Emotions. Losing real money changes decisions. Fear and the urge to win it back rarely appear when the balance is virtual.
• Slippage and partial fills. A real order can fill at a worse price than the one you saw, or only in part. Many simulators fill orders more easily than a live market would, so check how yours handles fills.
• Real fees and spreads. The gap between buy and sell prices and the fees you pay add up, and they are easy to underestimate on paper.
• How leverage multiplies losses. A simulated loss on a leveraged position feels harmless. A real one can exceed what you put in.

US regulators treat simulated results with caution too. CFTC Regulation 4.41 requires a prescribed statement next to simulated or hypothetical performance in commodity advertising. It begins "These results are based on simulated or hypothetical performance results that have certain inherent limitations". The rule applies to commodity pool operators, commodity trading advisors and their principals. It is not a statement about Webull or Schwab. It does show that US rules treat simulated performance as something that needs a warning, not as evidence of real results.

The real results are sobering. A study of Taiwan day trading data from 1992 to 2006, published in the Journal of Financial Markets in 2014, found that fewer than 1% of day traders predictably and reliably earned positive abnormal returns net of fees. Most retail traders lose money, and leverage multiplies those losses. A good run in a simulator is not a prediction of real profits.

Before you switch from paper trading to real money

There is no fixed time after which you are ready. A better test is whether you follow your own written rules consistently and understand every cost on every trade. For a closer look at the risks, read what day trading involves.

If you do decide to trade with real money, FINRA warns that margin trading is high risk and that you should only use money you can afford to lose. A cautious way to apply that is to start without leverage and with an amount you could lose entirely, because even an unleveraged position can fall to zero.

UK readers face an extra problem. The FCA banned firms in or from the UK from selling, marketing or distributing derivatives that reference certain unregulated cryptoassets to retail consumers from 6 January 2021, in policy statement PS20/10. In June 2025 the FCA said the ban on retail access to these derivatives remains in place. So if a provider offers UK users a "crypto CFD demo", the live product it leads to is one UK firms may not sell to retail customers. Treat that as a warning sign.

Fake trading dashboards are not paper trading

From 2020 to March 2026 this domain hosted the "Bitcoin Billionaire" robot scheme. You can read what the Bitcoin Billionaire scheme was in our review. Schemes like it show balances and profits that look like a simulator, but they represent no real trades.

This is a documented pattern. On 27 September 2024 the CFTC announced charges against Aipu Limited and others. It alleged that they ran websites that mimicked trading platforms, used identical designs under different names, showed false online account statements and carried out no trading for customers, taking at least $3.6 million from at least 32 customers.

A balance on a screen proves nothing on its own. What matters is whether you can withdraw it to your own bank account or wallet, without paying a fee to release it. To see how these claims are built, read how AI trading bot claims hold up and how crypto trading scams work.

Frequently asked questions