Paper trading platform for algo strategies

What is paper trading, and why does it sit between backtest and live?

Paper trading means running a strategy on live market prices using virtual money. The rules are real, the prices are real, the money is not. On AKQX it is a deliberate middle step, not a toy: a backtest has already told you the idea was coherent on history, and paper trading asks the separate question of whether it still works when prices arrive one tick at a time.

Those are genuinely different questions. A backtest sees finished candles and assumes a fill at a price you nominated. Live markets hand you half-formed candles, a spread that widens when you most want it tight, and the occasional rejected order. A strategy can pass the first test and fail the second, and finding that out with virtual money costs nothing.

How AKQX paper trading works

Virtual capital, per market. Crypto and Indian equities each get their own paper wallet with its own capital pool, because mixing them would hide which market a result actually came from.

Broker-style margin. A paper position consumes margin the way it would on a real account, and a maximum leverage cap applies. This matters more than it sounds: a strategy that looks fine with unlimited notional often turns out to be unrunnable once margin is finite.

Costs still apply. Fee and slippage estimates are deducted from paper trades. A paper engine that fills for free is a worse simulation than a backtest, not a better one.

Readable state. Every deployed algo reports whether it is running, waiting for a setup, or paused. An algo that has sat in “waiting for setup” for a week has told you something real about how often your conditions occur, which is a number most traders never measure.

Comparing paper results against the backtest

The single most useful output of paper trading is not its profit figure. It is the drift: the gap between what the backtest predicted and what the same rules actually did on live prices. AKQX keeps both results so they can be read side by side.

Drift usually has one of a few causes, and each points somewhere specific:

• Worse fills than assumed — the backtest's slippage estimate was optimistic for your size or your market.
• Fewer trades than expected — conditions that looked common in history are rarer now, or the rules are stricter in practice than they read on paper.
• Signals arriving late — a rule depends on a candle close, and acting after that close is not the same as the backtest's instant fill.
• Rejections — insufficient margin, or a constraint the historical simulation never had to respect.

A small, explicable drift is a strategy worth taking seriously. A large or inexplicable one is a strategy that was being flattered by its own backtest, and the honest response is to go back to the rules, not forward to real money.

Crypto and Indian equities on paper

Crypto. Paper trading covers the crypto pairs AKQX supports, with footprint order flow available on ten of them. Crypto is also the only market where real execution is possible at all, and then only through your own exchange account with your own API keys.

Indian equities. NIFTY 50, BANKNIFTY and NSE stocks have charts and paper trading with their own wallet. AKQX offers no real-money execution for Indian equities, so for that market paper trading is not a step toward live trading — it is the whole of what the platform does.

Risk controls apply on paper, not just live

The guards are not switched off because the money is virtual. A maximum leverage cap, fee-aware position sizing, a minimum stop distance, circuit breakers that halt after a set number of consecutive losses with a cool-down, and a daily loss cap all operate during paper trading.

That is on purpose. If a circuit breaker is going to stop your strategy, it is far better to discover that during paper trading, where you can see which rule tripped and decide whether the rule or the strategy is wrong. Discovering it for the first time with real money is the expensive version of the same lesson. The full list of controls is on its own page.

Limits per plan

A free account runs 1 paper algo alongside 10 backtests a month, 3 saved strategies and 5 AI requests a month. Paid plans raise the paper algo count to 2 on Starter, 5 on Pro Trader, 15 on Advanced and 50 on Professional. Every price is shown in rupees on the pricing page before you pay, and a free account never needs a card.

Questions about paper trading

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