How long should you paper trade before going live?
Paper trading duration: what you are really testing, when longer runs help versus delay, and signals to exit paper and go small in production.
How long paper trade before live and paper trading before live trading are among the most common deployment searches. The honest answer is not a fixed number of days. Paper trading tests operations: connectivity, order types, latency, and whether your signals behave like research when infrastructure is real.
What paper trading does not prove
Paper trading does not guarantee profit because fills are not fully adversarial. It also does not fix overfitting in research (Overfitting guide).
What paper trading is good at
- Catching API and config mistakes early
- Verifying risk limits and position sizing logic
- Building logging habits before capital is on the line
Practical duration guidance
Run paper long enough to see multiple regime slices for your timeframe (weeks, not hours for most swing systems). If you change parameters or code mid-run, reset the clock or label the change.
When to move to live with small size
Move when you have stable logs, a kill-switch plan (Strategy kill-switch), and validation evidence that matches your risk tolerance (Deploy framework).
Related searches: incubation vs rejection
People also think in terms of incubate vs reject trading strategy. Paper is incubation. If evidence is weak, reject or simplify before live.