Practice (Replay Trading)
Practice lets you trade the chart's history bar by bar. You rewind to any point, step candles forward one at a time, and place trades against what you can actually see — no future data, no hindsight. It is the fastest way to put reps on a setup without risking money.
Practice is entirely separate from real trading. It never touches an exchange, never uses your API keys, and its P&L never appears in your journal, positions, or exchange-pays volume.
Starting a Session
- Open the Terminal (
/main) and start Replay from the chart toolbar — pick the bar you want to begin from - Open the Practice panel in the dock
- Trade with New Long / New Short, then step the replay forward
The Practice panel is always in the dock. While a replay is running it moves to the front with the trade controls; when you are not replaying it sits at the end and shows your balance and trade history, so past results stay visible.
Placing a Trade
Practice uses the same drag-to-place setup as real trading:
- Click New Long or New Short — an entry, stop-loss, and take-profit draft appears on the chart
- Drag the three lines to the levels you want. The panel shows entry, SL, TP, and the resulting R:R live
- Set your risk in dollars — position size is derived from the distance to your stop
- Click Place
The order rests as a limit at your entry line. Step the replay forward and it fills — or doesn't — exactly as the candles allow.
| Control | Notes |
|---|---|
| $ risk | Dollars risked to the stop. Clamped to between $1 and your current balance |
| fee % | Taker fee charged per side. Defaults to 0.06%, like a real exchange. Set to 0 to trade fee-free. Remembered between sessions |
| Cancel | Removes an unfilled resting order |
| Close | Market-closes an open position |
A practice position is drawn as a draft overlay, not a real position — so there is no ✕ on the chart to close it. Use the panel's Close button.
How Fills Work
The simulator is deliberately strict about look-ahead, because a paper-trading tool that flatters you is worse than useless:
- A limit order fills at the next bar's open or at your price when the bar trades through it — never on the bar you placed it on
- A gapped stop-loss fills at the worse of your level and the bar's open; a gapped take-profit at the better one. Gaps cost you what they would cost you live
- If both your stop and target are hit inside the same candle, the stop is taken — the pessimistic assumption
- If a fill would land your entry on the wrong side of your stop, the trade is voided rather than booked as a free win
Fees are charged once per round trip, on both sides, at the rate captured when the position opened.
Stepping and Rewinding
Play, step +1, jump to a date, or pick a random start. Two rules keep the simulation honest:
While a practice trade is open or resting, rewinding is blocked — you will see "Close the practice trade first." Jumping backward mid-trade would let you re-run a candle you already traded. Forward stepping is always allowed.
Re-bucketing chart types (Volume, Renko, Range) is blocked the same way while a trade is live, because changing bucket size re-identifies the bar your fill happened on.
Practice works on any chart type, including the re-indexing ones — one step reveals one bucket — and on any pane in a multi-chart layout, though only one pane can own a practice session at a time.
The Demo Balance
All practice trading shares one virtual balance of $10,000, across every exchange and symbol. Each closed trade books against it.
The panel shows your balance plus Trades, Win rate, Total R, and Fees. Reset balance returns you to $10,000 and clears the log — it cannot be undone.
The balance syncs across your devices and tabs. A reset is authoritative: it propagates and clears sessions running elsewhere rather than letting an old tab re-book pre-reset trades.
Performance
The Performance button opens a full analytics view of your practice log:
- Net P&L, total R, win rate, and profit factor
- Equity curve, R-distribution, max drawdown, streaks, and a long/short split
- A per-trade table with Run-up and Drawdown (the maximum favourable and adverse excursion each trade reached)
The R-target optimizer
The most useful part. For every fixed target from 1R to 6R, Crodl replays your trades as "take profit at T, stop at −1R" and compares the result to what you actually did.
It answers a question you cannot eyeball: would a mechanical target have beaten your discretionary exits? Each row also shows how many of your actual losers would have become winners at that target. Results are net of the same fees your real practice trades paid.
The optimizer needs per-trade excursion data, which is only recorded for trades taken after the feature shipped. Older trades still count in every general statistic but are excluded from the sweep and show "—" for Run-up and Drawdown.
What Practice Is Not
Practice results are not a track record. You can rewind and re-trade the same setup until it works, so the numbers measure reps, not edge. They deliberately do not appear on leaderboards, in your Journal, or in your exchange-pays volume.
For risk-free practice against live markets rather than history, use an exchange demo account instead — connect a demo-mode API key in Settings → API Keys and trade it like any other account.