Your trading day
There is nothing to start. On a live account your trading day begins with your first order — place it and the day is open. A preview counts as well: a dry-run is priced against the live market, so it opens the day exactly as a real order does. The opening balance is the account’s carried cash, so there is nothing to set per day either. Three conditions apply to that first order:
You need a registered free account — visitors can’t trade live — and the account has to be active. An archived one is refused.
The market must be open and live data flowing. Before a trading day’s data begins (or after the close) orders aren’t accepted.
A live account trades one day at a time — today’s. It runs through the close, where it settles automatically.
The trading screen, positions, and activity views work just like practice mode — but every quote and fill reflects the live market, and the clock is the market’s.
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 climbs one ladder, always forward, and once terminal it stays there:
The first three are working states — the order is still in play, and you can still cancel it or revise its price. Buying power is reserved once it’s resting on the book: while it’s pending we’ve accepted it but nothing has confirmed it yet, so it holds nothing back. In practice you’ll almost always see live: pending normally flashes past in well under a second, and routed is reserved for a future venue. When the exchange is slow to confirm, a limit or stop order simply stays pending — it is placed, it waits, and the exchange confirms it when it gets to it; the close resolves anything still waiting. There’s no rewind — a filled order can’t go back to working — and no new orders are accepted after the close. The tour below walks every path a resting order can take.
Canceling and replacing
You can cancel any order that hasn’t finished yet — in any of the three working states, because getting out of a position should never depend on where the order sits on the ladder. A cancel is a request: the order shows as canceling… while it travels, and it ends canceled if it was still resting, or filled if the market got there first. That race can’t be designed away — every real exchange has it — so the final status, not the click, is the answer. A limit or stop order the exchange hasn’t taken up yet is the one case with no race at all: cancelling it resolves it canceled straight away, and it is never sent. A market order is not in that class — it is with the exchange from the moment you place it — so cancelling one takes the ordinary path.
You can also revise a working order’s price — a cancel-and-replace. Only the price and price-effect can change; the type, legs, and underlying stay as they are. The revision is an order in its own right: it appears in your order list the moment you ask for it, linked to the order it revises, and the exchange then retires that order and rests the revision in a single step, so the book never holds two of them at once. You can revise an order that hasn’t reached the book yet — the intent is recorded now and applied when it lands. What you can’t do is have two revisions of the same order working at once, or revise one that’s finished or already being canceled.
If the revision is never applied — the exchange refused it, you cancelled it, or the close arrived first — it stays in your list with its own outcome and the one you were revising keeps working. That’s the same thing you already see when a placement never makes it to the book, and it’s deliberate: an order you asked for always shows up, and it always says what became of it.
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 trading day 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. See End-of-day settlement for the mechanics.
On a rare day settlement trails further behind, and a day still waiting on it stays fully workable: you can cancel whatever it has resting and close its positions. It never blocks the next day either — your first order tomorrow opens tomorrow, as usual.
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, and every view recomputes as you move it. This review lives in its own Replay section — see that page for how it works and how it differs from practice.
Tips
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.
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.
Live orders are only accepted 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.