What exactly is being simulated?
A simulation records fictitious buys and sells according to price and cost rules. None of the results in the exercise below comes from a real account. You can use observed prices to practise, but the execution model remains distinct from an order actually sent to the market.
A simulator may simplify liquidity, the order queue, partial fills or delays. Interactive Brokers, for example, documents differences between its simulated and real accounts. This source illustrates the limits of a simulator; it does not describe the rules of the BULLSAGE engine. Source: IBKR, Paper Trading Account.
Write the rules before you know the result
- Choose a precise learning goal: sticking to a stop, calculating a quantity or explaining a decision not to trade.
- Note the price source, its timestamp and any delays.
- Set the planned entry, invalidation, target, quantity and exit rule.
- State your fee and slippage assumptions (slippage being the gap between the expected price and the price actually obtained), even when they are zero.
- Also keep the losing scenarios and the decisions not to act.
Changing the rules after every loss makes it impossible to understand what is really being tested. If a rule changes, start a new series and keep the old one. A simulation on past prices must avoid using information that was not known at the time of the decision.
A journal with numbers, without dressing up the result
Entirely fictitious exercise
Initial virtual capital: €10,000. Buy 18 units at €100. Planned stop at €95. Simulated exit at €95 and assumed total costs of €10.
- Gross result: 18 × (95 − 100) = −€90.
- Net result: −90 − 10 = −€100.
- Final virtual capital, with no other trades: €9,900.
If the simulated exit is worsened to €94, the net result becomes −€118 and the capital €9,882. This second scenario tests sensitivity to the execution price.
A journal line can contain: date, instrument, source, hypothesis, entry, stop, quantity, exit, costs, net result, rules followed and lesson learned. The gap between the plan and the action matters as much as the fictitious financial result.
Which measures to track?
- The number of documented decisions, including decisions not to trade.
- The proportion of decisions that followed the rules set before entry.
- The simulated net result, the average gain and the average loss.
- The largest fall in virtual capital from a peak, or drawdown.
- Results by market condition, without selecting only the favourable periods.
In a fictitious series of €10,000 → €10,200 → €9,690, the fall from the peak is €510, i.e. 5% of €10,200. That is not the same measure as the −3.1% change relative to the initial capital.
What a winning streak does not prove
A small sample can be favourable by chance. An optimistic fee model, liquidity assumed to be unlimited or a selection of the best cases can also artificially improve the results. The emotional pressure of a real loss is not reproduced by a virtual balance.
Success in a simulation is therefore neither a return forecast nor an automatic green light to move to real money. There is no magic number of trades here that would remove this uncertainty.
Getting started with BULLSAGE
First go back over the position size calculation, then test your assumptions against the public tools. The Academy and the methodology provide the educational framework. Always check the availability and freshness indicators shown in the product; unavailable data does not become reliable just because it appears in an exercise.
Get the trading plan kit (PDF)
The plan to fill in, the eight questions to ask before acting, the position size calculation and a journal template. You will also be told when the platform opens, on 1 January 2027.