Quick start

Run your first paper-trading session in a few minutes.

Get from sign-up to your first paper trade in a few minutes. This walkthrough uses the web app; if you'd rather drive everything programmatically, jump to the API overview.

1. Create an account

Anyone can browse live and recent market data without an account. To place trades, you need a free account. Sign up with your email; we send a 6-digit verification code to confirm it's you. A free account immediately unlocks everything: the trading simulator, the strategy builder, and backtesting — see Access & accounts.

2. Pick a trading day to practice

Practice is a one-click, account-less $100,000 sandbox for past trading days — nothing to set up. Two ways to trade:

  • Practice — replay a past session with full control of the clock: jump to the open, scrub forward minute by minute, or rewind. Great for studying how a setup would have played out. No account, no engine choice — just pick a day.
  • Live — trade today's session against the real-time market as it happens through a live account. No time travel; the clock is the real clock.

(Broker accounts are coming soon.) For your first run, click Start Trading (or the Practice nav), pick a recent date, and you'll land on the trading screen for that day with $100,000, dropped at a random mid-morning moment with the rest of the day ahead of you.

3. Read the option chain

The center of the trading screen is the option chain — every available strike with its calls and puts, showing the bid, ask, and live delta. The strike nearest the current SPX price is the at-the-money strike. See Option chain for how to read every column.

4. Build an order

Click a cell in the chain to add a leg to your order ticket. Add more legs to build a spread or an iron condor — every leg fills together as one atomic order. Choose an order type:

  • Market — fills right away at the natural price (the ask when buying, the bid when selling).
  • Limit — only fills if the price reaches the level you set.
  • Stop — sits idle until a trigger price is crossed.

Before you commit, the ticket shows the projected fill price, fees, and the impact on your buying power. Read more in Orders & order types.

5. Track your position

Once filled, your trade appears in Positions with live P&L and delta, and a payoff chart showing your profit and loss across the range of SPX prices. In practice, advance the clock and watch the position mark-to-market in real time. At 4:00 PM ET the day settles automatically — in-the-money options exercise or assign, out-of-the-money options expire worthless. See Positions & P&L and End-of-day settlement.

Where to go next