Paper Trading Game

How the paper trading game works

Paper trading means practicing with pretend money before any real money is at risk. This game gives you $10,000 and a watchlist of six crypto pairs from the Bybit spot market: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE and ADA, each priced in USDT. Every round replays one real Monday-to-Friday week since January 2022, picked at random, and keeps the dates hidden until the week ends. Each day runs from 9:30 to 4:00 New York time in five-minute steps, using the real 5-minute candles from those hours. Press Start market to run the clock, pause it at any time, and use the order ticket to buy or sell. At the end of the week the game compares your result with buying all six coins in equal amounts at the first open and holding them.

The four order types

• Market order: fills right away, at the ask when you buy and at the bid when you sell. The SEC explains that a market order guarantees execution but not the execution price.
• Limit order: sets the worst price you will accept. A buy limit can only fill at your limit or lower and a sell limit only at your limit or higher, so it may not fill at all.
• Stop order: waits until the price reaches your stop, then becomes a market order. The stop price is a trigger, not a guaranteed price, so a sell stop can fill well below it after a fast drop or an overnight gap.
• Stop-limit order: also waits for the stop, but then becomes a limit order. You control the price, yet the order can stay unfilled if the market moves past your limit.

Day orders vs GTC orders

A Day order is good only for the trading day you place it and expires at the close. A good-til-canceled (GTC) order stays open until it fills or you cancel it. In the game, GTC orders carry over the night, which is exactly when a gap can push a stop fill far past your stop price. Brokers set their own limits on how long a GTC order can stay open, so check the rules before you rely on one.

Real prices and trading costs

Every price in the game comes from real 5-minute candles on Bybit's spot market: the open of the 9:30 candle, then the close of each candle to 4:00. The candles were downloaded from Bybit's public market data with the open-source ccxt library and stored as static files. Nothing is smoothed or generated. Crypto trades around the clock, so the game skips the hours between the 4:00 close and the next 9:30 open, and the jump you see at the open is the real move in those hours. Orders are checked at each price the game shows, the 9:30 open and then the close of every candle, so a price that only touched your level inside a candle does not count.

The game has no order book. It quotes a bid 0.05% below and an ask 0.05% above each real price as an allowance for spread and slippage, every fill pays a 0.1% fee, and the buy and hold comparison pays the same ask and fee. Prices are in USDT, and the game counts one USDT as one dollar.

Five drills to try

1. Buy with a market order and look at the fill: you pay the ask, not the last price.
2. Place a buy limit at the bid and see whether the price comes back to it before the close.
3. Protect a position with a sell stop about 3% below the price, then open the next day and watch for gaps.
4. Switch that stop to a stop-limit and see how it can miss the exit in a fast drop.
5. Use a buy stop above the ask to enter only if the price breaks higher.

For the ideas behind this game, read paper trading explained, then compare order types in market orders vs limit orders and what is a stop-limit order. When you want a longer run with ten tickers and a leaderboard, open the stock market simulator.