Paper trading (also known as forward performance testing) is the final step of the testing phase. We include the trading strategy to the real-time environment of our system and we send fake orders. After a day of trading, we will have the logs of all the orders and compare them to what they were supposed to be. This step is useful because it allows us to test the strategy and use the entire trading system.

This phase is a way to do a last test of the trading strategy before investing real money. The benefits of this phase are the absence of any financial risk whatsoever, while the trading strategy creator can acquire confidence and practice in a stress-free environment while building new datasets that will be used for further analysis. Unfortunately, performance obtained by paper trading is not directly correlated to the market. It is difficult to ensure that an order can be fulfilled, or not, and at what price. Indeed, during a period of high market volatility, most orders can be rejected. Additionally, orders could be fulfilled at a worse price (negative slippage).