What is paper trading?

The name is old. Traders used to write hypothetical orders on paper and work out the profit by hand. Now a simulator does it: it books the trade at the live price and marks the position as the market moves, so the PnL is always current.

It earns its keep with perps. Watching a 10x position swing on an ordinary day teaches leverage faster than any definition. It also works for testing a rule, say fading any SOL perp move of more than 5 percent in a day, across enough days to see whether the rule holds.

The results flatter you, though. Most simulators fill you at the displayed price, with no slippage, spread or partial fills. And a paper loss does not hurt. That second part matters more than people admit. Plenty of traders who are disciplined on paper freeze or panic once the size is real.

Say you start with $100,000 of paper money, open a $20,000 BTC long at 5x, which ties up $4,000 of margin, and close it a week later 4 percent higher. The simulator shows $800 of profit. What it cannot show is how that order would have filled in a thin, fast market.

Also called: simulated trading, demo trading.

The Paper trading widget starts you with a $100,000 paper balance. You can go long or short on stocks (no leverage) or on the 50 busiest Hyperliquid perp markets, at any whole leverage up to the maximum Hyperliquid sets for each. Marks come from live prices, the running PnL is stored locally, and a History tab keeps your last 50 closed trades with a win rate. Nothing ever reaches an exchange. Fees, funding and slippage are not modeled, positions are never liquidated, and share links strip paper positions out.

• Paper trading

• Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

• Leverage
• Long and short
• Stock perps
• Slippage