Paper trading

Virtual cash is a real balance

A paper portfolio is funded, not scored. When you create one you choose a starting balance and that money becomes a cash holding sitting in the book alongside the positions — not a counter kept off to one side. A buy debits it, a sell credits it, and the balance is what every later trade is checked against.

This is the one thing paper books do differently from manual ones. A manual portfolio keeps cash in the ledger only, because a manual buy is a record of something that already happened at your broker and there is no balance to consult. A paper buy is a decision being made now, so it has to be affordable.

You can add virtual cash or take it out at any time. Both are ordinary ledger events — a deposit and a withdrawal — which means performance treats them as external flows rather than as gains, and topping the book up never shows as a profitable day. A withdrawal larger than the balance is refused.

Starting balance

Between 100 and 10,000,000.

Cash after a trade

Gross value plus fees, applied to the balance in the same transaction that writes the trade.

Counts toward net worth

No. A paper book never enters your net-worth figure.

Fills use a live quote, or they do not happen

Every paper fill is priced from a quote fetched at the moment you submit, and always at the current time — there is no back-dating, because filling at a price you already know moved in your favour teaches you nothing.

If the market-data provider cannot answer, the trade fails closed. It does not fall back to yesterday’s close, and it does not queue. A paper fill on a stored closing price would teach you a price that never existed, which is a worse outcome than a refused order.

Why a fill gets refused

The book refuses rather than approximates. There are four reasons, and each one names itself:

• No quote available. The provider is down or the data quota is exhausted. Nothing is written; try again later.
• Not enough cash. The buy costs more than the balance, so it is stopped before anything is written and a paper book can never report negative cash. The message names both figures.
• Overselling. You cannot sell shares the book does not hold. The same protection a manual portfolio uses applies here unchanged — a paper book is still a book.
• Currency mismatch. The ticker trades in a currency the book does not hold cash in.

Fractional shares, one currency

Quantities are fractional to eight decimal places, the same precision holdings are stored at everywhere else in Bitnora. A contribution-sized buy does not have to be rounded into whole shares to be expressed.

A paper portfolio holds one cash currency, and it can only trade instruments priced in that currency. That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight: a single cash balance cannot honestly fund a trade priced in another currency without an FX leg, and inventing the conversion rate would be exactly the kind of quiet fiction the rest of the product refuses. Multi-currency paper books are not supported yet.

The same engine as a funded book

Paper trades are written into the same ledger, replayed by the same daily-state engine, valued by the same pricing pipeline, and measured against its targets by the same drift maths as a real portfolio. Nothing about a paper book is a separate simulation with its own rules, which is what makes the practice transfer.

So a paper portfolio can carry targets, show drift, appear in the income view when its holdings pay, and be the subject of an AI review. The public demo book is a paper book, which is why everything on it is real.

The fastest way to get a paper book worth practising on is to fork the demo portfolio at sign-up: you start with positions, cash, and target weights already in place instead of an empty screen.