Live trading

Live trading lets you paper trade today's session against the real-time market as it happens. It runs on a live account — a persistent account with a cash balance that carries day to day. The experience mirrors a practice session, but the clock is the real clock — there's no time travel.

Starting a live session

On a live account, open today's session. The opening balance is the account's carried cash — you don't set it per day. 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 open one.
• Each live account has at most one open day at a time — today's. Trade it through the close, where it settles automatically.

Once started, the trading screen, positions, and activity views work just like practice 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 arrives — typically a few minutes after the bell; the Replay view shows a countdown until the day is ready. Its closing balance carries into the account, and it moves into the account's history. A day that has traded can't be discarded; it settles at the close (that's how the cash carries). A day with no orders can be abandoned, freeing the slot to open a fresh one. See End-of-day settlement for the mechanics.

Reviewing a settled day

Once a live day has settled, you can replay it read-only. The clock that was fixed to the real market while the day was live becomes yours to scrub: move it through the session to watch exactly how your positions, delta, and P&L evolved, moment by moment, and step through your orders and transactions as they happened. Everything is recomputed on the server from the market data — the review is a faithful mark-to-market of the day you actually traded, not a re-simulation. You can't place, change, or cancel orders on a settled day; it's a look back, not a redo.

This review lives in the Trade section as Replay — distinct from Practice, which is the editable sandbox for days you didn't trade live. Replay answers "what did I actually do, and how did it unfold?"; practice answers "what would happen if…?".

Tips

• Do the post-mortem the same day. Right after a session settles, replay it and scrub to your entries and exits. Seeing where the mid actually was when you clicked — while you still remember what you were thinking — is the highest-value ten minutes in the whole loop.
• Rejected fills are information. A live order can pass every check at placement and still reject at fill time if the market moved your buying power in between. If that happens more than rarely, you're sizing too close to the edge.
• Rehearse before the open. The live session only opens while the market is open and data is flowing. If you're waiting for the bell, spend the time in practice on a similar past day — same chain, same engine, zero stakes.