A Squad publishes opinions; a strategy turns them into trades. Paper trading is where you prove that loop works — real prices, simulated capital, and a full position record — before any of it touches money. This page walks the exact chain from a Squad's call to a filled paper position, because knowing who does what is the difference between trusting the system and hoping about it.
The chain, from call to position#
- The Squad decides. On its cadence it wakes, deliberates on each of its markets, and records a call — long, short, hold, or risk-off — with a confidence. Nothing is traded at this step, ever.
- The strategy reads the call. A strategy that has added the Committee Decision indicator sees the standing call as a line, held between wakes, alongside the Squad's confidence and running score.
- Your rules fire. The strategy's own signals decide what the call is worth — enter long when the Squad is long and its score is positive, stand aside when the call is stale, whatever you wrote.
- Every enabled venue gets the signal. A signal fans out to each venue mapped to the strategy — paper and live alike, on the same pipeline. A paper venue simulates the fill; a live one places a real order.
- A position opens and appears in the Positions view like any other, linked back to its strategy and venue. An opposite-direction signal on an open position flips it; exits close it.
The Squad's part ends at step 1. If a Squad-driven strategy is trading badly, the fault line to inspect is step 3 — the rules you wrote around the decision line. See using a Squad in a strategy for the indicator and its lines.
Who decides the size#
Not the Squad. A position's size comes from the venue it opens on:
- the venue's available funds — its allocation plus realized profit and loss, less withdrawals;
- times the venue's Max Position Size (%) — half the balance by default;
- clamped, if need be, by your account-level Risk Guard ceiling for that book — paper and live each have their own.
The Squad's confidence and any size it suggests are advisory colour in the transcript, nothing more. Two strategies following the same Squad on different allocations open different-sized positions from the same call — which is exactly what you want.
Paper fills are deliberately unflattering#
The paper book's job is to predict how live would have gone, so its fills are modelled against you, not for you:
- Every fill pays a 0.1% fee, and profit and loss is net of fees.
- Orders never fill better than the market. Entries allow 0.5% slippage, widening on each retry up to a 2% cap, so getting in during a fast move costs more — as it does live.
- A market whose price feed has gone stale for more than 15 minutes refuses to fill rather than trading a frozen price.
- Stops and take-profits are checked once per candle on the strategy's timeframe — the same cadence the backtest uses — not tick-by-tick, so a fast move inside a candle can fill past the configured level.
The result is a paper record you can compare honestly against both the backtest and, later, the live book.
What you will hear about#
Two kinds of notification, from two different places:
- The Squad changing its mind — fired only when a call actually changes, not on every wake, and it links to the Squad's Performance view.
- Position events — opened, stop hit, take-profit, closed — from the strategy pipeline, identical for paper and live, on whatever channels the strategy's alert settings name.
So a quiet day means the Squad restated its view and nothing crossed your rules — not that nothing is running.
Give a Squad-driven strategy the same probation you would give any other: a paper venue, a few weeks, and the fund-grade statistics over the result. The Squad's own score tells you whether its calls pay; the paper record tells you whether your rules around those calls pay. Both need to be true before the strategy earns real capital.