A real 4-hour crypto chart stops at your entry. Pick long or short, place a stop loss and, if you like, a take-profit. Then watch what the market actually did over the next 10 days, and how the same trade would have gone with a tighter or a wider stop.
For a long trade, tap below the blue entry line to place your stop and above it to place a target. For a short, the other way round. The shaded area is where the next 60 candles will appear.
Each round shows 90 real 4-hour candles, about 15 days, from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP or Dogecoin on Bybit's spot market. The date stays hidden. You trade $10,000 of play money at the last close, either long (buy) or short (sell). Tap the chart to place your stop and your target, type the prices, or use the buttons: the stop buttons put the stop 0.5, 1, 2 or 3 ATR from the entry, and the target buttons put the target 1, 2 or 3 times your risk (R) away.
Press Start trade and the next 60 candles, 10 days, appear one by one. The trade ends at your stop, at your target, or at the last close if neither is reached. A table then replays the same entry with stops at 0.5, 1, 2 and 3 ATR and with no stop at all, so you can see what a different choice would have done. Ten charts make one game.
The SEC's investor education site describes the stop-loss order this way: "When the stop price is reached, a stop order becomes a market order." It also warns that the price you get "may differ from the stop price, especially in a fast-moving market." The simulator follows the same logic:
ATR, the average true range, is how far price usually travels in one candle. The simulator uses the 14 candles before your entry and, for each one, takes the largest of three distances: high to low, previous close to high, and previous close to low. A stop less than one ATR from the entry sits inside the normal movement of a single candle, so ordinary noise can reach it. A wider stop survives more of that noise but loses more when it is hit. One way to keep the dollar risk the same is a smaller position with a wider stop, and the position size calculator does that math.
We ran the simulator's rules over all five coins, entering at the close of every 12th candle, once every two days, both long and short. That gave 8,568 trades for each stop size, with no target and the same 60-candle limit.
| Stop distance | Stopped out within 10 days | Of those, in profit at day 10 with no stop | Average result per $10,000 trade |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.5 ATR | 91.6% | 43.7% | -$19.94 |
| 1 ATR | 83.3% | 38.6% | -$14.39 |
| 2 ATR | 68.3% | 29.4% | -$12.99 |
| 3 ATR | 54.3% | 21.3% | -$0.78 |
The tighter the stop, the more often ordinary movement took it out, and the more often the trade would have recovered. A stop 0.5 ATR away was hit within 10 days in 91.6% of these trades, and 43.7% of those would have finished the 10 days in profit without a stop. At 3 ATR, 54.3% were stopped out. No stop size made money on average, because the entries followed a fixed schedule with no signal and every trade paid fees and slippage. A stop decides how much a wrong trade costs. It does not make a trade right.
Try one approach for a full game of ten rounds, then another. The stop-loss and take-profit calculator works out prices and the reward to risk ratio for a trade you plan elsewhere, and what is a stop-loss order explains the order types. To see how leverage changes the picture, try the liquidation price calculator.
Educational, not financial advice. The simulator replays past prices with play money. Results on past charts do not predict future results.
An order that closes your position when price reaches a level you pick, the stop price. The SEC's investor.gov explains that a sell stop order is placed below the current market price and is generally used to limit a loss or protect a profit, and that once the stop price is reached the stop order becomes a market order.
Because a stop becomes a market order. The simulator takes 0.05% slippage off the stop price, and if a candle opened below your stop (above it for a short), you are filled at that open. In a fast market a real fill can be further away.
R is the amount you planned to lose if the stop is hit, before fees and slippage. A result of +2R means you made twice that amount, and -1R means you lost about what you planned. Costs and gaps can push a stopped trade a little past -1R.
Yes. They are 4-hour candles from Bybit's spot market for five coins, downloaded with the open-source ccxt library and stored without changes. The date is hidden during play and shown after the trade.
A 4-hour candle does not record whether its high or its low came first, so the simulator assumes the worse outcome for you: the stop.