📜 Paper Trading Rules (Beta)

A risk-free stock simulator. Learn how markets behave, compete on the leaderboard, refine your strategy — all with virtual money.

TL;DR: Each portfolio starts with $10,000 virtual USD. Buy or sell any U.S. stock at the latest Yahoo Finance close. Commission is a flat 0.1% per trade. No slippage, no margin, no shorting. Your goal is to grow the portfolio.

1. The Account

Starting balance: $10,000.00 in cash per portfolio.
Portfolio limit: Free accounts get 1 portfolio. Premium and trial accounts get up to 10.
Login required: You must be signed in to create or trade. Anyone can view public portfolios and the leaderboard.
Privacy toggle: New portfolios are public by default and listed on the leaderboard. You can flip any portfolio to Private at any time — private portfolios are only visible to you (and to site admins).
Delete is permanent: Deleting a portfolio also deletes all its trades and price history. There is no reset button — once you start trading, you cannot wipe the slate clean.

2. Pricing

Every trade — buy or sell — executes at the latest Yahoo Finance close for that ticker, fetched live by the server when you click the button. You cannot specify a price.

Source: yfinance → history(period="5d") last close, with fast_info as fallback.
Symbol set: Anything Yahoo lists (U.S. stocks and ETFs in USD recommended). Examples: AAPL, SPY, NVDA, VOO, BRK-B.
After-hours / weekends: Yahoo returns the most recent close. You can trade 24/7; prices stay at the prior close until the market re-opens.
Currency: All bookkeeping is in USD. Only USD-quoted tickers are accepted — non-USD venues (Borsa İstanbul, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Toronto, etc.) are rejected at purchase. The autocomplete only suggests U.S. exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE, NYSE Arca, NYSE American, BATS, OTC). If you ever paste a non-USD ticker manually, buy returns an error like “Only USD-quoted tickers are supported. THYAO.IS trades in TRY.”

No slippage, no spread, no rejections. This is an educational simulator. Real-world fills, partial fills, bid/ask spreads, halts, and after-hours premiums are not modeled. Treat your results as a learning tool, not a guarantee of live performance.

3. Commission & Cost Basis

Commission rate: 0.1% of the trade value (USD amount), applied to both buys and sells.
Buy math: If you spend $1,000 on AAPL, commission is $1.00 and $999.00 goes into shares at the current Yahoo price.
Sell math: Selling proceeds = shares × price × (1 - 0.001). The net is added to cash.
Partial sells: You can sell any portion of a position — enter the share count or use the 25% / 50% / 75% / All chips. Cost basis is pro-rated against the remaining shares; the average buy price stays the same.
Adding to a position: Buying a ticker you already hold averages the cost basis weighted by share count.

Action	Formula
Commission	`trade_usd × 0.001`
Buy shares	`(trade_usd − commission) ÷ current_price`
Sell proceeds	`shares × current_price × (1 − 0.001)`
Portfolio P/L	`(positions_value + cash) − $10,000`

4. What You Can and Cannot Do

Allowed

Buy any USD-quoted Yahoo Finance ticker, in any USD amount you have available cash for.
Sell any open position at the latest close.
Trade as often as you like — there is no daily limit, no day-trader rule.
Hold cash indefinitely — no interest is paid, but you are not forced to be fully invested.

Not allowed (simulator limitations)

No shorting — you cannot sell what you do not own.
No margin — you can never spend more than your cash balance.
No options, futures, or crypto — equities and ETFs only.
No limit, stop, or scheduled orders — every trade is market-on-click at the latest close.
No portfolio reset — if you blow up, you blow up. Delete and start fresh if you want a do-over.

5. Leaderboard

Only portfolios marked Public with at least one trade are listed.
Default sort is by return %. You can also sort by absolute P/L, total value, or trade count.
Trader names are shown as masked emails (e.g. il***z) for privacy.
Anyone — even logged-out visitors — can browse public portfolios and view their full position lists and trade history.

6. Prices Refresh Automatically

Open positions are re-marked to the latest Yahoo close on a server schedule (roughly hourly during U.S. market hours plus one final pass after the close). The portfolio detail page shows the timestamp of the last update.

If you place a trade, the server fetches a fresh quote at that moment — you do not have to wait for the schedule.

7. Fair Play

One account per person. Don't farm leaderboard slots with multiple registrations — we will remove duplicates.
Don't try to game thin or halted tickers. Positions in obvious manipulation candidates may be disqualified from the leaderboard.
If you find a bug that lets you exploit the simulator, please email info@fxcryptobots.com instead of using it.

8. Disclaimer

Paper Trading is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. All numbers are virtual. Nothing on this page or anywhere on fxcryptobots.com constitutes investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Past simulated performance does not predict future real-world performance. You are solely responsible for any real-world investment decisions. See the full risk disclaimer.

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