A free trading simulator that replays real charts
Pick a market and a date. The chart loads with the future hidden and you step it forward one bar at a time, placing trades by hand as your setup appears. Stops and targets are dragged onto the chart, position size comes off the stop distance, spread and commission are charged, and every session ends in a report. Nothing to install, no broker, nothing to deposit.
Two kinds of trading simulator, and which one you want
The word covers two quite different tools, and picking the wrong one wastes months.
A forward simulator — usually called paper trading — streams live prices and you trade alongside the real market with fake money. It rehearses the feel of a live session well. Its limit is arithmetic: practice arrives at exactly the rate the market produces setups, so if yours appears twice a week, a hundred-trade sample is most of a year.
A replay simulator shows recorded history with everything after the current bar hidden. You make the same decisions on the same information, but you hold the clock. The hundred trades that took a year forward can be collected across a few evenings. That is the only thing replay changes, and it is the thing that matters if your question is "does this strategy actually work".
This is the second kind. If you specifically need live prices and a live order ticket, a broker's paper-trading account is the better fit and we say so on our demo account page.
What you can simulate
93 instruments, with history reaching back to between 2009 and 2017 depending on the market, on 13 timeframes down to one-minute bars.
| Market | What is covered |
|---|---|
| Forex | Majors, minors and crosses — the bulk of the 93 |
| Indices | US500, US100, US30, GER40, UK100, JP225 |
| US stocks | AAPL, AMD, AMZN, GOOG, JPM, META, MSFT, NFLX, NVDA, TSLA |
| Metals & energy | Gold, silver and the main energy contracts |
| Crypto | Major pairs |
| Not covered | Futures, options, small-cap and non-US equities |
The stock list is a deliberate ten rather than the whole market. If you came here to simulate a specific small-cap ticker, this will not do it, and it is better to know that now than after signing up.
The details that decide whether the numbers mean anything
Costs are charged. Spread and commission come off every simulated trade and show as their own line in the report. A simulator that skips this will approve strategies that bleed out live, because the edge it measured never paid to get in or out.
Position size comes off the stop. Set risk as a percentage of balance and the lot size is calculated from the distance to your stop, the same way it should work with real money. Sizing by habit instead makes every result incomparable to the next.
The future is genuinely hidden. Indicators are computed only on bars that have happened, and the chart cannot be scrubbed forward past the current bar. Hindsight is the failure mode that makes practice worthless, and it has to be prevented structurally rather than by willpower.
Every trade can carry a note and a tag. Mark an entry A+, Mistake, FOMO, Revenge or News as you take it, then click the chip afterwards to jump the chart back to where it happened. Tagging while the decision is fresh is what turns a pile of trades into a readable record — more on that in tagging trades to find your edge.
The session report is the point. Win rate, average R, expectancy per trade, profit factor and maximum drawdown, plus the cost line. A balance that went up tells you almost nothing; those five numbers tell you whether it was skill or a small sample.
How many simulated trades before you trust the result
More than most people take. We measured the error band across sample sizes on our own data: at thirty trades, a measured win rate lands more than ten percentage points from the truth 28.4% of the time. That is how a losing strategy produces three encouraging weeks.
A hundred trades under one consistent set of rules and costs is a reasonable floor. The full distribution by sample size is in our study on backtest sampling error, and how many trades to backtest covers the practical side.
Simulating day trading specifically
Day trading is where replay earns the most, because the sample problem is at its worst. An intraday trader running one setup on a five-minute chart might see three or four valid signals a week — which sounds like plenty until you need a hundred of them to judge the edge, and that is half a year of sitting at a screen.
Replaying an intraday session compresses that. Load a one-minute or five-minute chart, pick a date, and step through a full trading day in a few minutes, taking every signal that appears. A week of historical sessions in an evening gives you the trade count that a month of live screen time would not.
Two things matter more intraday than they do on higher timeframes. The first is cost: on a twelve-pip target, a one-pip spread is eight percent of the move, which is why a simulator that ignores spread flatters scalping strategies so badly. The second is time of day — an intraday edge is often a session edge, and a setup that works in the London open can be noise at 21:00 UTC. We measured how much the hourly range actually varies in forex volatility by hour, and the busiest hour averages several times the quietest.
Running your first session
Write the rules down before you open a chart. Entry condition, stop placement, target, and what invalidates the setup. If the rules are not written, you will drift them trade by trade and the resulting numbers describe nothing repeatable.
Pick one instrument and one timeframe. Mixing markets in a first sample makes the result impossible to attribute. Add a second only once the first has a hundred trades behind it.
Set risk as a percentage and leave it alone. Varying size by conviction feels sophisticated and destroys comparability — you can no longer tell whether the edge came from the setup or the sizing.
Take every signal, including the ugly ones. Skipping the trades that look wrong in hindsight is the single most common way a simulated result ends up better than the live one.
Tag as you go, review at the end. The tag belongs on the trade at entry, when you still do not know the outcome. Then read the report rather than the balance — how to read backtest analytics walks through what each number is telling you.
What this does not do
No live prices. Everything here is recorded history, so it cannot tell you what the market is doing right now and it is not a substitute for a live feed.
No broker connection, no MetaTrader bridge, no automated expert advisors running on live data. Trades are placed by hand, which is the point for discretionary traders and the wrong tool if you are testing a coded robot on a live account.
And it cannot tell you a strategy is good. It reports what a set of rules did across the history you tested, with costs applied. That is a far better input than a hunch, and it is still a sample from the past.
Open a chart and take a trade
The free tier covers the whole loop — replay, trade, report. No install, no broker, nothing to deposit.
A trading simulator is software that lets you place trades against market data without money at risk. The useful distinction is not free versus paid but forward versus replay. A forward simulator, often called paper trading, runs on live prices in real time — good for rehearsing a platform and the feel of a session, slow for anything that needs a sample. A replay simulator runs on recorded history with the future hidden, so the same decisions are made on the same information while you control the pace, which is what makes a hundred-trade sample a matter of evenings rather than months.
What separates a simulator that produces trustworthy numbers from one that produces encouraging ones is unglamorous: whether it charges spread and commission, whether position size is derived from the stop rather than guessed, whether indicators are computed only on bars that have already happened, and whether the session ends in expectancy and drawdown rather than a balance. Any of those missing and the output flatters the strategy.
If you want to compare the tools in this category, including the ones that are not ours, see the best backtesting software compared. For the difference between simulating and using a broker demo, see the forex demo account alternative, and for the process itself, how to backtest a trading strategy.