Paper trade everything first
🌿 Growing·last tended August 29, 2026
Every trading idea feels brilliant at 11pm. The only honest filter I've found is to make it trade virtual money, with real market data and real latency, and keep a journal it can't edit.
Most ideas die in paper trading. That's the feature, not the bug — each one that dies there is real money that didn't.
The rule I'm converging on: a strategy needs a meaningful sample of paper trades and a drawdown I've actually watched happen without intervening, before it touches capital. Feelings about a strategy are not data about a strategy.