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 are a separate kind of account: a bot is a dedicated account that runs one of your saved strategies hands-free. You create and manage a bot on its own surface, and it is listed next to your trading accounts on the Trade dashboard, so every carried balance is in one place.
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
Every account opens with the fixed $100,000 starting capital. 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.
The settled close of one day is the opening cash of the next — nothing resets.
Two numbers describe an account's money. Say Wednesday is open and up a few hundred dollars so far:
Cash balance
The settled carry. Changes only when a day settles — never an in-progress day's unrealized P&L.
Current value
The live net-liquidation value while a day is open; 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 moves through a short lifecycle. 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:
Your clock
You own time. Move it and the day recomputes; nothing about your trades changes.
- Practice — a fresh day opens with the whole session ahead of you (you land at a random mid-morning moment). Advancing fills any pending orders whose conditions were met along the way, marks positions to that moment, and recomputes financials; rewinding reverts orders that hadn't filled yet and drops later trades from view.
- Replay — once a live day settles, you get the clock back to scrub through it read-only.
The market's clock
The real clock runs the day, tick by tick — there's no clock control.
- A live account's open day tracks today's real market as it happens. You can't rewind or fast-forward it.
- When that day settles, the clock becomes yours again for review — the market has finished writing the day.
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
Every account begins at the fixed $100,000, so two accounts' carried balances measure cumulative dollar P&L from an identical baseline — the difference between them is pure trading results, never a difference in starting size.
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.
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.