Choosing a day
The Practice home page lists the days you’ve already practiced — with their P&L — and lets you pick a new past session to trade. Open a trading day by picking a date; you can revisit every date we have, in any order. The trading screen loads the option chain and market data for that session with $100,000 to trade. From there the clock is entirely yours.
Controlling time
The defining feature of practice mode is the clock. You can jump, advance, or rewind it freely:
Land on any time between the 9:30 AM open and the 4:00 PM ET close.
Roll forward to watch positions mark-to-market and pending orders fill as their conditions are met.
Step back before a trade — orders that hadn’t filled yet go back to resting, and everything later stays listed, dimmed; transactions sit above the current-time line.
Drag the head, or use the clock. The order rests until 12:30 PM ET; scrub past it to fill, and back to make it resting again — the order itself never changes.
Revise any day
Practice is fully editable. Open trading days in any order, revise them freely, and re-settle as often as you like — the days never interfere with one another.
Every trading day is an independent, fixed $100,000 sandbox. Days never carry into one another, so revising or re-settling one never disturbs the others.
Open several separate simulations of the same day, side by side, to compare different decisions. Study, revise, and replay any day as much as you like.
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.
You can set the clock and study the chart anywhere from the 9:30 AM open, but placing an order begins a moment later — at the point where the day’s historical data begins, usually a minute or two after the bell. Scrub to that time (the option chain offers a one-click jump) and trading opens.
Pending orders and time travel
When you place a limit or stop, 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; rewind before it and the order goes back to resting — while its trades stay on the ledger, above the current-time line, telling you what the rest of the day still holds. This makes “what would have happened” questions instant to answer — it’s the mechanic the clock above demonstrates.
A limit the market has to come to starts out resting on the book — status live — and needs its price to hold for three consecutive seconds, so the earliest fill is two seconds after you place the order; so does every stop. One you priced past the market does not wait at all: it crossed the spread on arrival and fills on the second you placed it. When a fill comes, a limit the market had to come to fills at your price, not at whatever the mid happened to touch — including when the market moves through it while it rests, which fills it right then, still at your price. One you priced past the market fills at the market it crossed, as of the moment that price was set — the moment you placed the order, or the moment you gave it a new price. Same rules live, and same rules in a backtest.
End of day
Advance the clock to 4:00 PM ET and the day settles automatically: in-the-money options exercise, out-of-the-money options expire worthless, and the results land in your realized P&L. See End-of-day settlement. Rewind back before the close and the day re-opens for editing — settlement, like everything else here, is just a view of the clock.
Tips
The whole value of practice is deciding without knowing the rest of the day. Place the trade at the moment you land, manage it forward in small jumps, and only after settling look at the full chart to grade yourself.
Pull the worst sessions from a backtest’s day list and trade them yourself. Feeling a max-loss day tick by tick teaches you more about whether you can run the strategy than any summary metric.
Same day, same entry, different exit — rewind and try each variation back to back. It’s a controlled experiment on real market data, something live trading can never give you.
A setup that survives a handful of ordinary Tuesdays is worth more than one tuned to a memorable crash. Pick dates you don’t remember; the random starting time exists for the same reason.
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.