Alerta Practice: trading with a virtual balance

Alerta Practice is a paper-trading account inside AlertaChart. You trade on live prices with virtual money, so you can test ideas and learn the controls without risking anything. It is part of the Pro and Elite plans.

Getting started

On a computer, press Alerta Practice on the right-hand toolbar; on a phone, open the analysis centre from the chart's bottom bar and choose Alerta Practice. Your practice account starts with 100,000 virtual dollars. You can reset it at any time and start again.

Placing orders

• Market orders fill at the current price.
• Limit orders wait for a better price.
• Stop orders trigger when the price breaks a level.

Choose long or short, set the size and the leverage, and add take-profit and stop-loss levels if you want. Your positions appear on the chart, and you can drag the take-profit and stop-loss lines to move them. The ticket opens on about $10,000 of the chart's symbol at its live price, whatever the coin costs. On a computer, once you are signed in to Practice, the Sell and Buy boxes under the symbol on the chart, which show the bid, the spread and the ask, send a market order of about $10,000 at once.

Following your account

The panel under the chart shows:

• Your balance, equity and available margin
• Open positions with their profit or loss, liquidation price and levels
• Waiting orders, order history and balance history

Take profit, stop loss and liquidation are handled even while AlertaChart is closed, just as on a real exchange.

Good habits

• Use the same size and risk you would use with real money; otherwise the practice does not teach much.
• Write down why you entered each trade.
• Combine it with Bar Replay to practise on past markets, and with alerts to catch your levels.

Practice results are simulated and do not include every cost of real trading, such as slippage in fast markets.