5. Paper Trading in Replay

Bar replay reveals history one bar at a time. Paper trading works inside it, so you can rehearse a setup — enter, manage brackets, exit — on past data without knowing what the next bar holds, and then review the result in the Account Manager.

A separate account per replay session

Starting a replay does not touch your live Paper Trading account. As soon as the replay is ready, a dedicated demo account named after the replayed ticker and the start time — e.g. Replay BTCUSDT · Aug 28, 22:41 — is created with the same starting balance and settings, and the Account Manager switches to it. Every order you place while the replay runs goes into that account, and the account dropdown shows both.

When you leave replay — jump back to realtime or cancel it — the replay account is archived: a journal entry records the ending balance and number of closed trades, and the Account Manager returns to the live paper account. Archived replay accounts stay in the dropdown, suffixed (ended), for review until they are pruned on a later load (the newest eleven sessions are kept alongside the live account). Starting another replay — even after a page reload — always creates a fresh account; an ended session is never reopened, and a session left open by a closed tab is closed automatically the next time the app loads.

How fills work in replay

Replay bars are complete OHLC bars, so the engine uses the intrabar path rule: each replayed bar is walked open → nearer extreme → farther extreme → close, and a limit or stop inside the bar fills at its own price.

The trading panel shows a Replay badge, and its buttons are disabled until the replay has finished loading; the panel (and ⇧B / ⇧S) is hidden while you pick the start bar. Orders you place, modify, or close during replay are time-stamped on the replayed bar's clock, so fills, journal entries, and markers sit on the replayed candles rather than on today's date. Order lines, bracket lines, the position line, and fill markers are all drawn on the replayed bars — the first interactive overlays allowed during replay — and each marker is anchored to the bar in which it filled. Moving the cursor backwards does not rewrite the account that already traded future bars. Instead, it archives that replay branch and starts a fresh replay session/account at the older cursor with a new broker clock; the prior branch remains available for review. Forward cursor movement stays in the current session. While a replay runs, the live Paper Trading account cannot be traded at all — the broker itself refuses orders, closes, reversals and bracket edits for it from every surface, since the chart's prices are replay prices; switch to the replay account, or leave replay. When a session ends, the archived record keeps the prices it was last marked at, so its P&L no longer moves with later replays or live ticks. Alerts and drawings remain disabled in replay as before.

CSV data

Imported CSV symbols have no realtime feed, so they cannot be paper traded on a live chart — the panel shows No realtime. Inside replay, however, the bars drive the fills, so a CSV dataset becomes fully tradable. This is the intended way to practise on your own data.

A practice loop

1. Open the chart you want to study and choose a timeframe.
2. Start replay and pick a start bar before the setup you want to rehearse.
3. Turn on the trading panel (⌥P), set a quantity, and step forward. Enter with the panel or the ticket; attach a take profit and stop loss.
4. Manage the trade as bars arrive: drag brackets, add to or trim the position, or close with ✕ on the position line.
5. When the sequence is over, open Account Summary for the numbers and Journal for the sequence of events, then jump back to realtime.

Multi-pane layouts replay from one time cursor, so a position opened on a 5-minute pane is marked and filled consistently with a 1-hour pane of the same symbol.

What replay does not simulate

• Liquidity and partial fills. Any quantity fills whole at the computed price.
• Bid/ask spread. Fills use the last price; use the slippage setting to approximate a spread.
• Real time between bars. Order durations are judged against the replayed bar timestamps as they arrive (a DAY order's day is the replayed day it was first evaluated on — US Eastern for stocks and futures, UTC for crypto and forex — so it expires when the replay crosses into the next such day), so prefer GTC for orders you intend to keep across a replay session. A GTT expiry is validated against the replay clock too.

Reviewing a session

Every replay account keeps its own history, so a session can be reviewed the way a backtest is:

• Account Summary reports net profit, win rate, profit factor, max drawdown, and average trade for the session, computed with the same definitions as the Strategy Tester — a discretionary replay run and a Pine strategy over the same bars can be compared number for number.
• Trades lists every fill with its effect on the position and the realized P&L it booked.
• Journal shows the order of events — placements, stop triggers, bracket activations, fills, expiries — so the review stays honest: you see what you knew when you acted.
• Export history CSV from the History tab keeps the record outside the browser before the archived account is eventually pruned.

Archived replay accounts are read-only: they appear as (ended) in the dropdown, the trading panel is disabled, and any Trade, Reset, or line action shows an Archived account notice. Their working orders are cancelled when the session ends, so the record holds only what actually happened. Switch back to Paper Trading in the account dropdown to keep trading on the live feed.

Next steps

Tune commission, slippage, confirmations, and backups.

Next: Settings, Reset & Export