Algodeal is a platform that lets you backtest your strategies on historical data, using specified start and end dates.

Since version 1.4, you can also select your strategies for paper trading. Strategies selected for paper trading will automatically be backtested again every 24h with the latest market data available.

Why selecting a strategy for paper trading

As far as you are concerned, you might want to see your backtests refreshed with the latest market data. This has been possible by re-running a strategy manually every day, but the paper trading option does that for you.

Another reason is discipline. You might want to see how your strategy behaves in a situation very close to live trading, where it is not possible for you to change the source code.

Finally, marking a strategy for paper trading is a good way to make it more visible to us, so that it gets a better chance to be selected for entering into a contract and for trading on the live market. In fact, it could be said that a strategy selected for paper trading means that:

• you are confident it is a pretty good strategy, or at least one of your 5 best strategies
• you are confident that the strategy is not over-fitted
• you would like to see that strategy considered for live trading

Remember that, if you do not wish to put your strategy on our radar, it is always possible to refresh your strategy results with the latest market data by re-submitting your strategy.

How to select a strategy for paper trading

Once you have executed a strategy on our grid, the backtest results page will display an icon for each backtest:
Clicking this icon will select your strategy for paper trading.
This is it: your strategy will be automatically executed every day with the latest historical data.

On the backtest results page, strategies selected for paper trading are identified by this icon:
For those strategies, you can also click "Paper trading results" to see the results of the latest execution.
Paper trading results include both results of the entire backtest (starting from the start date specified in the strategy), and the results from the date when the strategy has been selected for paper trading.

Note that, because we update historical data with a delay of three days, it can take up to three working days of paper trading to see actual results.

Restrictions

Some rules apply for selecting strategies for paper trading:

• strategies must not specify an end date; in other words, the @MarketData annotation should only specify the start date: @MarketData(start="2000/01/01") (having no @MarketData annotation would work, too)
• strategies must not use optimized parameters
• there are no more than 5 strategies selected for paper trading at any given time.

Removing a strategy from paper trading

You can deselect paper trading on a strategy by clicking again on the icon.
(Warning : this will also delete all backtests executed automatically for paper trading this strategy ; you can manually re-run backtests if needed)