How to start paper trading with a simple plan

By Etaaro · Last updated 18 September 2026 · Educational content, not investment advice

This is a concrete way to start paper trading in a week, using one market, a one-page plan and ten trades. It is deliberately small. Most people fail at practice trading because they start with everything at once, not because they picked the wrong indicator.

Day one: pick one market and stay there

Choose a single market and refuse to look at the others for now. Not because the others are worse, but because ten trades spread across crypto, currencies and equities teaches you almost nothing about any of them — you end up with three samples of three, and no baseline for how any single market behaves.

Pick the one you already read about without being paid to. Curiosity survives a boring fortnight better than discipline does.

Day one: choose a balance you would actually risk

Set a simulated balance close to what you would realistically commit if this were real. Not ten times that, and not a token amount either.

The reason is that position sizing is the habit you are really building, and sizing is meaningless in the abstract. If you practise with a million and would really trade with two thousand, every sizing decision you rehearse is one you will never make.

Day two: write a plan that fits on one page

A plan you cannot recite is not a plan. Four questions is enough to start:

1. What has to be true for me to enter? Describe it concretely enough that another person could look at a chart and agree that it happened, or did not.
2. How much am I risking on one trade? A fixed fraction of the balance is the simplest answer and easier to follow than a number you renegotiate each time.
3. What tells me I was wrong? Decide this before entering. It is the only moment you will ever be genuinely impartial about it.
4. What would make me stay out today? The condition under which you do nothing, which is the rule most beginners never write and most professionals do.

Write it down somewhere you will see it. In RATTLE the plan lives on your desk, next to the journal.

Days three to ten: take ten trades and log every one

Ten is not a statistically meaningful sample and is not meant to be. It is enough to find out whether you can follow your own instructions, which is the actual question at this stage.

• Log the trade when you close it, not at the end of the week.
• Record the ones you are embarrassed by. Those are the sample.
• Note what you expected and what surprised you, in a sentence.
• Tick honestly whether you followed the plan — separately from whether it made money.
• Include fees in the dollar result.

After ten trades: the only review that matters yet

Ignore profit and loss entirely for this first review. Open the ten entries and count:

• How many did you enter according to the plan?
• How many did you exit according to the plan?
• How many notes say something useful, and how many say "bad trade"?

If most of them followed the plan, keep going and start caring about results around the fifty-trade mark. If most did not, the problem is not your strategy and changing it will not help. Either the plan is too vague to follow, or it describes trades you do not actually want to take. Fix that first.

A worked example

Suppose you set a $10,000 simulated balance and decide to risk 1% — $100 — per trade. You take a long, it goes against you, and you close it at your predetermined exit for a $100 loss. That is −1R: one unit of your own risk, exactly as planned. A working trade that returns $250 is +2.5R.

Recorded that way, a small trade and a large one sit on the same scale, and a run of small disciplined losses stops looking like failure.

Set up a desk and take the first trade

What to do next

Once ten trades are logged and reviewed, extend to fifty before drawing conclusions, then read how to keep a trading journal for what to record as the log grows, and the mistakes that quietly corrupt practice results before you start trusting the numbers.