6. Settings, Reset & Export

Paper-trading settings live behind the Settings gear in the Account Manager header and the Trading properties… item in the chart's right-click menu. They shape how fills are simulated, what the app asks before acting, and how your data is kept.

Settings

Changes apply to future orders and fills; they do not rewrite history. A journal entry records each settings change. Per-symbol quantities remembered by the trading panel are stored alongside the settings.

Choosing commission and slippage

A realistic paper account is usually a slightly pessimistic one. Match your venue's fee tier — for example 0.1% of notional for spot crypto, or a few dollars per order for equities — and add a tick or two of slippage for market and stop fills, especially on providers without bid/ask (Massive, Alpaca) where fills otherwise happen at the last price. The Costs section of the ticket preview shows the commission an order would incur.

Reset account

Reset in the Account Manager header (or in settings) returns the current account to its initial balance after a confirmation. Nothing is lost: first the run you are ending is archived, then the account restarts. It:

• keeps the previous run as a read-only account named <account> · until <date> — e.g. Paper Trading · until Aug 29, 10:12 — in the account dropdown, marked (ended), with its positions, orders (working ones cancelled), history, executions, closed trades, statistics, and journal intact, exactly like an ended replay session;
• clears all working orders, brackets, and positions from the live account;
• clears its order history, executions, closed trades, and performance statistics;
• keeps your settings and remembered quantities;
• writes a journal entry recording the reset, so the fresh journal still shows when — and from what state — you started over, and shows a toast naming the archived record.

Resetting an account that has never traded leaves no archive behind. Archived records count towards the twelve-account cap, so older ones are eventually pruned — export before then if a run matters, or delete records you no longer need from the account dropdown (hover a row for its Delete button).

Reset acts on the account currently selected in the dropdown, so you can reset the current replay account without touching the live one. Archived (ended) accounts — ended replay sessions and pre-reset records — are read-only and cannot be reset. Reset and delete first write and verify a recovery backup; if that backup fails, the operation aborts without changing the account.

Export and import

• Export downloads the whole paper-trading state — settings, every account, orders, history, executions, journal — as a JSON file. Use it as a backup or to move to another browser. To export a single account instead, hover it in the Account Manager's account dropdown and use its Export button; the file has the same format but holds only that account.
• Import merges an exported file into this browser's state: accounts in the file replace the records with the same id, every other account is kept, and the file's settings apply only when it carries the live Paper Trading account (a full export). A confirmation lists exactly what will be added and replaced before anything changes. The previous state must be written and verified under the backup key first; failure aborts the import without mutation. Supplied nested records are validated strictly, while legacy v1 exports missing optional lots/closed trades migrate explicitly. A single-account export therefore adds (or refreshes) just that record. Files not produced by Fractal Chart, malformed supplied records, unsupported versions, lifecycle/domain mismatches, and invalid timestamps are refused.
• Export history CSV writes complete audit rows with time, symbol, side, type, qty, limitPrice, stopPrice, price, status, filledQty, avgPrice, duration, takeProfit, stopLoss, commission, realizedPl, positionEffect, source, actionOrigin, message, orderId, executionId. User-controlled formula-like text is prefixed safely; numeric values, including negatives, remain numeric.

Storage and limits

Everything stays in your browser. Paper trading never sends orders anywhere; the state is saved in local storage on this device under a single versioned key.

• State persists across sessions but is not synced across devices or browsers, and is removed if you clear site data. Export regularly if the history matters to you.
• Caps keep the store small: 500 open orders, and the newest 2,000 final orders, 5,000 executions, and 2,000 journal entries per account; a soft cap of 12 accounts. The live account and every active replay are always retained, even if that temporarily exceeds the cap; archived replay/pre-reset records are evicted oldest first with a notice — export records you want to keep before they age out. Cumulative aggregates preserve lifetime trade statistics when detailed rows roll off.
• If the browser refuses to save (storage full or blocked), a red Not saved pill appears in the Account Manager header, a toast explains, and the broker keeps retrying while trading continues in memory. It first makes room by trimming archived records to their newest 500 executions, 500 closed trades, 300 final orders and 300 journal entries (an amber Trimmed pill then stays visible); live accounts are never trimmed. Export before storage fills up if a run matters.
• Several tabs. State carries root and per-component revisions. Independent changes to different accounts or settings are merged; divergent edits to the same component keep the newer saved state, show a conflict, and leave the rejected action retryable instead of silently overwriting either tab. A replay running in one tab is never executed by another broker instance. Keep active trading in one tab at a time.
• On load the state is validated and repaired — a stray final order in the open list moves to history, a bracket whose parent no longer exists is canceled, lots are rebuilt from the position when they do not reconcile, and a record with no closed-trade ledger at all gets one rebuilt from its executions — so a damaged store never breaks the app. A blob written by a newer version of the app, or one that is not valid JSON, is never overwritten: it is copied to a backup key (fractal.chart.paper-broker.backup.v1), you are told, and paper trading starts fresh.

Like watchlists and alerts, this is the local-first model used across the workspace; see the storage note in the FAQ.

Feed quality and what it means for fills

The trading panel's badge tells you what your fills are worth:

Reminder: paper trading is a simulation for practice and review. Simulated results — with or without commission and slippage — do not predict what a real order would have done. Fractal Chart is not a broker and does not route orders anywhere. See the Risk Disclosure.

Next steps

Ask the assistant about your trades.

Next: AI and Paper Trading