Paper Trading Won’t Prove Your Strategy Works
The first bot I ever took live had run clean on paper for five weeks. Day three of real money, it opened the same position twice inside forty seconds — a retry loop firing on an API timeout the demo environment had never once produced.
Paper trading didn't catch that. It couldn't. Nothing in a simulator times out.
Most traders use a demo account to answer one question: does this strategy work? That's the single question it's least equipped to answer, and the reason sits in how it fills you.
Look at what a paper account does with an order. Market orders fill at the last printed price. Limit orders fill the instant price touches your level. Stops fill exactly where you placed them, to the tick, and size is irrelevant — a $200 order and a $200,000 order both fill as though the book were bottomless.
Live markets don't...
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