A practice desk that charges you properly

Why it exists

Most people learn intraday trading by opening a real account and finding out what it costs. That tuition is expensive and the lesson arrives slowly, mixed up with everything else that happened in the same month.

The alternative is usually worse. A simulator that ignores brokerage, taxes and margin teaches a version of the market that does not exist — one where a trade that captured fifty paise of premium is a win, where you can sell an option for the price of the premium, and where every statistic you build about yourself is computed on money you would never have kept. Practising in that is not neutral. It actively trains habits that cost money later.

So this one is built the other way round: the costs are the product. Brokerage is flat per order and splits when an order exceeds the exchange's freeze quantity. STT applies on the sell side, stamp duty on the buy side, GST on brokerage and exchange and SEBI fees but not on the taxes. Short-option margin is a percentage of the underlying's notional, and when the underlying's price is not available the order is refused rather than guessed at. Every statistic — win rate, profit factor, expectancy, drawdown — is computed on net P&L.

What it does

• NSE cash equities and index options on NIFTY, BANKNIFTY and FINNIFTY, at live prices from a broker data feed.
• A ₹1,00,000 virtual balance, a double-entry ledger behind it, and margin blocked and released exactly as a position is opened and closed.
• An option chain, charts with EMA and CPR overlays, stop-loss and target levels including trailing stops, and a full record of every closed trade.
• A private performance record you may publish under a handle if you want to, and a leaderboard scored on risk-adjusted return rather than raw percentage gain.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not give advice. There are no calls, no tips, no target prices, no model portfolios and no recommendations of any kind. We are not registered with SEBI as a research analyst, an investment adviser or a stock broker, and nothing here is investment advice. See the Terms.
• It does not touch real money. You cannot deposit and you cannot withdraw. No order placed here reaches an exchange. The broker connection is read-only — market data and history, nothing else — and there is no code path in the application that can reach an order endpoint.
• It does not let you buy your way up. A refill tops a fallen balance back to the starting figure and never past it, requires a flat account, and is capped per month. Refilled capital counts as capital for scoring, so it lowers a percentage return rather than inflating one.
• It does not carry positions overnight. Everything squares off at 15:20 IST. That is what makes overnight margin and mark-to-market carry unnecessary to reason about.
• It shows no greeks and no implied volatility. There is no options pricing model in the application at all. Your position is marked against the contract's own last traded price, so time decay and volatility reach you inside that price exactly as they reach everyone else trading it.

Who runs it

thepapertrade is operated by Equantra Tech LLP. It is a small, independently built project — not a broker, not a subsidiary of one, and not funded by one. There is no affiliate arrangement with any broker or advisory service, and the site takes no commission on anything you do elsewhere.

Advertising on the blog and the public pages is supplied by third parties and is not an endorsement. It will never appear on the pages where a simulated trade is composed or managed.

Questions, corrections and bug reports are all welcome — get in touch.