Practice

Practice lets you paper trade past trading days with full control of the clock. It's a one-click, account-less sandbox: each trading day opens with a fixed $100,000 — nothing to create, no starting capital to choose. It's the best way to study setups, rehearse a strategy by hand, or see exactly how a trade would have evolved through the day.

Choosing a day

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. To keep you honest, a fresh day drops you at a random mid-morning moment rather than always at the opening bell — you haven't seen the rest of the day yet, so what you do next is a real decision, not a memory. From there the clock is entirely yours.

Controlling time

The defining feature of practice mode is the clock. You can:

• Jump to any time between the open and the 4:00 PM ET close.
• Advance forward to watch positions mark-to-market and pending orders fill as their conditions are met.
• Rewind to before a trade — orders that hadn't filled by that point revert to pending, and later trades drop out of view.

Moving time is read-only: it recomputes your positions, delta, P&L, and buying power at the new moment without ever changing your orders. Nothing is destroyed when you rewind, so you can replay a day as many times as you like.

Revise any day

Practice is fully editable: you can open trading days in any order, and each day is its own independent, fixed $100,000 sandbox — days never carry into one another, so revising or re-settling one never disturbs the others. You can also run several separate simulations of the same day, side by side, to compare different decisions. Study, revise, and replay any trading 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.

Pending orders and time travel

When you place a limit or stop that isn't immediately marketable, 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 with its trades visible; rewind before it and the order returns to pending. This makes "what would have happened" questions instant to answer.

End of day

Advance the clock to 4:00 PM ET and the day settles automatically: in-the-money options exercise or assign, 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

• Trade first, peek later. 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.
• Replay a strategy's worst days by hand. 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 actually run the strategy than any summary metric.
• Use rewind to isolate one variable. 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.
• Don't overfit to one famous day. 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.