Paper Trading on ProRealTime: A Beginner’s Guide

Utilizing paper trading accounts provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate a trading platform and its compatibility with your investment strategies within a risk-free setting.

Through paper trading, you are allocated virtual funds to simulate placing trades, eliminating the need for real money while you fine-tune your approach to the markets. With this feature, you can familiarize yourself with market dynamics and explore the platform’s functionalities without putting your own capital at risk.

In this article, we’ll review ProRealTime’s paper trading simulator and provide an in-depth guide that includes:

• How to open a paper trading account and get started with ProRealTime
• Navigating the dashboard and exploring key features
• Executing trades
• Managing your positions
• Overall impression and review

Getting started with ProRealTime Paper Trading

ProRealTime is a French-based tech company that emphasizes advanced charting software and technical analysis tools across multiple asset classes, including stocks, futures, commodities among others… It’s also partnered with leading online brokers, including Saxo Bank, Interactive Brokers, and IG. This review will focus on its web app, a browser-based platform that requires no installation.

To sign up for ProRealTime’s paper trading simulator, complete the following steps:

1. Visit ProRealTime Web
2. Click ‘Sign in’ with the top right-hand button
3. Fill in the form that pops up – sign up requires an email address
4. You’re ready to start trading

Navigating ProRealTime’s dashboard

ProRealTime’s paper account comes with €30,000 of virtual currency, and the dashboard emphasizes charts. The layout is simple: one chart that takes up the majority of the screen and a list of popular instruments. Clicking an instrument will automatically open its chart, as well as a volume tracker along the bottom of your screen. Your deal ticket is at the top of the screen above the chart.

On the right hand-side of the platform, you’re able to view and select from a list of other options, including top movers, latest news, auto trading, portfolios, and existing orders.

Selecting any of these replaces your default watchlist.

If you’d like more than one chart displayed at a time, simply select ‘Workspace’ from the top-right corner of the screen. Select ‘Create a workspace’, and you’ll be given the option to load up to four charts simultaneously—adding and removing these charts seems to be fairly intuitive.

Once you’ve created your desired setup, you can give it a custom name and save it—but there’s also an option to open your new workspace in a new tab, meaning that you can switch seamlessly between several different workspaces if you want. This is a very useful feature.

Executing trades with ProRealTime’s paper trading simulator

Executing trades with ProRealTime is where its strengths lie in the platform. Its charting software allows for a number of capabilities; it’s possible to trade directly from the charts and customize your chart as you see fit.

With technical analysis indicators, trendlines, and an intuitive toolbar, you can personalize the charts to a great level of detail as you analyze markets from a technical perspective and place your trades.

Placing and managing your orders directly from the charts is fairly straightforward. Simply select the market you want to trade – either from the default list or the search function within them (look for the plus sign when ‘Lists’ is selected) – and the platform will update with the chart. Next, select the quantity for your order and click buy or sell, depending on the direction of your trade. Your trade is immediately opened and will appear as a level on the chart.

Once a position is opened, you can add a limit order and/or a stop order – also known as take profit or stop loss – directly from the position label on the chart. ProRealTime uses OCO orders (One-Cancels-the-Other), which means that if your limit order is executed, the stop order is automatically canceled.

You can also easily adjust the orders of your position directly on the chart, which allows you to complete your technical analysis as you monitor your trades without navigating away from the screen.

Monitoring and analyzing trades

ProRealTime’s paper trading simulator comes with a plethora of tools to help you monitor and analyze your trades.

There are over 50 indicators that you can apply immediately to any chart from the drop-down list; there’s also an option to draw your own support and resistance lines. The platform has a feature called ProRealTrend, which applies automatic trendlines to any chart of your choosing and can help you apply your take profit/stop loss much more quickly. In the full version of ProRealTime, you can even create your own objects and indicators.

There’s also an integrated newsfeed that is not only searchable—you can find any recent news relating to an instrument by searching for it in the news tab—but you can also see the publication of the news relative to price movement on the chart, too. Notice at the bottom of the chart there are news icons—if you hover over them, you can see the headline of the day that correlates with the market going up or down.

If you’ve applied any technical analysis to your trades and you’re ready to close your position, it’s as simple as opening them. When you’re ready to close your position, simply click the red cross to the right of your label – this can also be applied to any existing orders you have on your position.

Overall, the platform offers a really superior experience to help you manage your trades. For further information and guidance, you can even select the ‘advanced’ tab and select from a range of platform tutorials embedded directly into the platform. These videos go in-depth into the platform’s features and capabilities.

Our take on ProRealTime’s paper trading simulator

Simply put, ProRealTime’s platform is second to none for any trader, regardless of their experience level. It has enough tools and indicators to satisfy an experienced investor but is intuitive and accessible enough for a beginner.

With an emphasis on interactive chart trading, an easy-to-navigate dashboard, and a huge range of markets to choose from, there are few better demo accounts to try out than ProRealTime’s web platform. Its slick interface, one-click trading, and various tools allow you to have a really superior experience when accessing the markets.