Live trading

Live trading lets you paper trade today's session against the real-time market as it happens. The experience mirrors historical replay, but the clock is the real clock — there's no time travel.

Starting a live session

Open Live and start a session for today with your chosen starting capital. A few conditions apply:

• You need a free account — visitors can't trade.
• The market must be open and live data flowing. Before the session's data begins (or after the close) you can't start one.
• You can have one active live session at a time. Start one at the open and trade it all day — or end it early and start a fresh one.

Once started, the trading screen, positions, and activity views work just like historical mode — but every quote and fill reflects the live market.

Placing live orders

Live orders use the same order types — market, limit, stop, and multi-leg — and the same fill rules. The key difference is the lifecycle. A live order moves through real states and, once terminal, stays there:

Status	Meaning
pending	Accepted, waiting for a matching tick
filled	Executed
canceled	You canceled it while still pending
expired	Auto-expired at the 4:00 PM ET close
rejected	Failed a buying-power recheck at fill time

There's no rewind: a filled order can't become pending again. No new orders are accepted after the close.

Canceling and replacing

You can cancel any still-pending order. You can also atomically cancel-and-replace a pending limit order's price in one step — observers never see two orders pending at once. Only the price and price-effect can change in a replacement; the type, legs, and underlying are fixed. Trying to cancel or replace an order that's no longer pending returns a conflict.

Real-time updates

While a session is live, the screen updates continuously from the market feed — quotes, position marks, P&L, and delta all move tick by tick. Order status changes (fills, cancellations, rejections) and account changes push to every open tab in real time, so you always see a consistent picture. If you're building your own client, this stream is available over the WebSocket API.

Settlement and ending

After the 4:00 PM ET close, the session settles automatically once the official closing tick is recorded, then moves into your history alongside your past sessions — you can review it later exactly like any historical replay. You can also end a session early, which clears it so you can start a fresh one for the same day. See End-of-day settlement for the mechanics.