Practice

Practice lets you paper trade past trading days with full control of the clock. It runs on a practice account — a persistent ledger of recorded days whose cash balance carries forward. It's the best way to study setups, rehearse a strategy by hand, or see exactly how a trade would have evolved through the day.

Choosing a day

On a practice account, open a trading day by picking a date — you can revisit every date we have on record. The trading screen loads the option chain and market data for that session, parked at the open, with the account's carried cash balance.

Controlling time

The defining feature of practice mode is the clock. You can:

• Jump to any time between the open and the 4:00 PM ET close.
• Advance forward to watch positions mark-to-market and pending orders fill as their conditions are met.
• Rewind to before a trade — orders that hadn't filled by that point revert to pending, and later trades drop out of view.

Moving time is read-only: it recomputes your positions, delta, P&L, and buying power at the new moment without ever changing your orders. Nothing is destroyed when you rewind, so you can replay a day as many times as you like.

An editable ledger

Because the account's balance carries day to day, a practice account is an editable ledger: when you edit an earlier day — change a trade, or re-settle it — every later day re-threads so its carried balance reflects the change. You can build up a continuous track record across many recorded days and revise any of them.

Trading a past day

Everything else works like live trading: build orders from the chain, track positions and their payoff chart, and review your orders and transactions in the activity view. Because you control the clock, you can place a limit order, jump forward to see whether and when it filled, then rewind and try a different price — a fast way to develop intuition for how 0DTE setups behave.

Pending orders and time travel

When you place a limit or stop that isn't immediately marketable, the system scans the rest of the session and pre-computes exactly when (if ever) it would fill. Advance past that moment and the order shows as filled with its trades visible; rewind before it and the order returns to pending. This makes "what would have happened" questions instant to answer.

End of day

Advance the clock to 4:00 PM ET and the day settles automatically: in-the-money options exercise or assign, out-of-the-money options expire worthless, and the results land in your realized P&L. The day's closing balance carries into the account. See End-of-day settlement.

From practice to automation

Trading a day by hand is great for learning, but to test an idea across many days at once, encode it as a strategy and run a backtest. The strategy builder turns a setup into a reusable, testable strategy.