Accounts & trading days

A trading account is a persistent, named container with a continuous cash balance that carries day to day. You trade an account one trading day (a session) at a time. Accounts power live and bot trading — the trading screen, positions, and P&L are all views into a single day under an account.

Replaying past trading days doesn't use an account at all. Practice is a separate one-click $100,000 sandbox — no account to create, no starting capital to choose. This page is about the live/bot accounts.

Accounts and their engines

Every account is created with a fixed engine that decides how it trades:

• Live — paper-trades today's real session against the live tick stream. Past sessions are frozen. Covered in Live trading.
• Broker accounts — trading through a real brokerage — are coming soon; they aren't available to trade yet.

Trading bots — also coming soon — are a separate kind of account: a bot is a dedicated account that runs one of your saved strategies hands-free. Bots live on their own surface and never appear in your regular accounts list.

Trading is 0DTE SPX-index options only: cash-only, no equities, and no overnight positions, so an account's balance is a single number that simply rolls from one day to the next.

The continuous balance

An account opens with a starting capital (anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000,000). Each trading day opens with whatever cash carried over, you trade, and at the 4:00 PM ET close the day settles — its closing balance becomes the account's new carried balance and the next day picks up from there.

Two numbers describe an account's money:

• Cash balance — the settled carry. It only ever changes when a day settles, so it never reflects an in-progress day's unrealized P&L.
• Current value — the live net-liquidation value while a day is open on the account; otherwise it just equals the cash balance.

Trading days (sessions)

A session is one trading day under an account. Orders, positions, transactions, and the equity curve all live under a session. Each day reports a full financial picture:

• Net liquidation value — opening balance + the day's total P&L.
• Unrealized P&L — mark-to-market gain or loss on open positions.
• Realized P&L — locked-in gain or loss from closed positions and settlements.
• Available buying power and maintenance margin — see Buying power & margin.

A day's status is open, settled, or abandoned. In practice you land on the open day (or the latest settled one); a live account has at most one open day — today's.

The clock

Whose clock a session runs on is the fundamental split:

• In practice, the clock is yours. A fresh day opens with the whole session ahead of you (the app drops you at a random mid-morning moment so you don't always start from the same bar — jump anywhere from there). Advancing the clock fills any pending orders whose conditions were met along the way, marks your positions to that moment, and recomputes financials. Rewinding does the reverse: orders that hadn't yet filled at the earlier time revert to pending, and trades after that time drop out of view.
• A live account's open day has no clock control: it tracks the real market, tick by tick. But once a live day settles, you get the clock back for review — scrub through the settled day read-only to see exactly how it played out. See Reviewing a settled day.

Crucially, moving time is read-only — it never changes your orders or trades; it just recomputes what the day looks like at the new moment. You can rewind and replay as much as you like.

Per-day history

Whenever you place or cancel an order, the day computes a per-second history of its financials across the whole session and stores it for charting. This is what powers the equity curve on the trading and positions screens.

End of day

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

Tips

• Size the starting capital to the strategy. A defined-risk credit vertical only reserves its spread width in margin, so even a modest account supports meaningful testing — but pick a figure you'd actually trade, or the P&L won't teach you anything about your own risk tolerance.
• Use separate accounts for separate experiments. Accounts are free and unlimited; giving each idea its own account keeps its equity curve, history, and win rate unpolluted by everything else you tried that week.
• The cash balance is the scoreboard. Because nothing resets between days, the carried balance is the honest, cumulative answer to "is this working?" — one bad day is visible in the carry forever, exactly like a real brokerage statement.