Paper Trading on Polymarket: Test a Strategy on Live Order Books
Paper trading runs a Polymarket strategy on live data and scores every signal against the real order book, without placing orders, holding funds or needing a key. Here is how it works and how to read it.
How a paper run works
When a wallet your strategy follows fills an order, or when your own rules all hold, the run records a signal and tries to copy it: a simulated fill on the live order book, after the leader's fill, walking the offers up to your price limit. A partial fill is whatever the book held. The copy is then marked at the live book until the market resolves or an exit rule sells it.
Every signal ends in one of five outcomes:
| Outcome | What it means |
|---|---|
| Copied | The book let a copy in within your limit |
| No fill | The book did not have the size within your limit |
| Leader sold first | The leader sold before the copy could enter |
| Capped | One of your caps stopped it: money open, copies a day, a daily loss stop |
| Skipped by the rules | The signal fell outside your markets or filters |
The share of signals that end in Copied is the first thing to read. A strategy whose signals mostly end in No fill is smaller in practice than its backtest suggests.
How long to run it
A run lasts 10 days unless you choose another length: 3, 10 or 30 days, until you stop it, or any end from 1 to 90 days ahead. You can change the end while it runs. When a run ends, its open copies still settle and its numbers keep following them.
The run page counts toward 50 resolved copies. Before that the sample is too small to say much. Reaching 50 stops nothing; it is the point where the result starts to mean something.
What to read on the run page
- Per $10, resolved: the result per $10 put into copies that have settled.
- Book let a copy in: how often the order book took the copy.
- Entry vs leader: what a copy paid compared with the trader it followed.
- Money in play: the average, the peak and the deepest fall.
What it is not
A paper run places no orders. It does not connect to a wallet and cannot trade for you; live trading is not available in Polyrank. Its fills are simulated against a real book, which is closer to reality than a backtest and still not the same as an executed order.
Start one
Open the Strategy Lab, ask a question or open a strategy, backtest it, and press Paper-trade this on the report. Paper trading is part of the plans that include the Lab; the pricing page lists how many runs each plan keeps going at once. The full reference is in the docs: Paper trading. For the step before it, read How to backtest a Polymarket strategy.
Questions
Can you paper trade on Polymarket?
Polymarket itself has no paper mode. Polyrank's Strategy Lab paper-trades a strategy on live Polymarket data: it scores each signal against the real order book at that moment without placing an order, holding funds or needing a key.
How is paper trading different from a backtest?
A backtest replays past trades with modelled fills. A paper run works forward on live data and checks each signal against the order book as it actually was at that moment, so it shows how often a copy would really have got in and at what price.
How long should a paper run last?
Long enough to settle a meaningful number of copies. In the Strategy Lab a run lasts 10 days by default and can be set from 1 to 90 days or left open, and the run page counts toward 50 resolved copies before the result is treated as more than a small sample.
Does paper trading place real orders?
No. Nothing is bought or sold, no wallet is connected and no funds are held. The results are simulated and are not a forecast or advice.
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