Why We Paper Trade First: Building a Verified Track Record
Every strategy on QuantaEdge must survive 60+ days of real-time paper trading before any subscriber capital is involved. No exceptions. This is not a limitation — it is the entire point.
The Problem with Backtesting
Backtesting is useful for stress-testing a hypothesis. But any backtest can be made to look good by selecting the right time window, the right parameters, and the right exit rules — often unknowingly. This is called overfitting, and it is endemic in retail algo trading. Strategies that look great on five years of historical data frequently fall apart the moment they go live.
Paper trading does not solve this entirely, but it eliminates one crucial form of bias: hindsight. A paper trade executed at 10:14 AM on May 2 reflects the information available at that moment — not a retrospective curve-fitted decision. The fills are real (IBKR paper uses live market data), the timestamps are verifiable, and the outcome cannot be revised after the fact.
What Paper Trading on IBKR Means
QuantaEdge runs all strategies through a real-time paper trading environment. Paper accounts route through live market data feeds and use realistic fill models based on current bid/ask spreads. A paper fill at a $0.55 credit is a fill that could have been executed live at that moment at that price.
This means the track record you see on the Performance page is not a marketing construct. Every trade has a timestamp, entry price, exit price, and P&L that corresponds to what IBKR reported in real time. We do not round up winners or exclude losers.
The June 1, 2026 Reset
The current track record started June 1, 2026. This is a deliberate clean-slate — all historical paper trades before that date are excluded from the performance page to avoid cherry-picking a favorable starting period. The 90-day window runs June 1 through August 30, 2026.
Any strategy that does not meet the graduation criteria (win rate ≥ 55%, profit factor ≥ 1.3, Sharpe ≥ 0.5, max drawdown ≤ 20%, zero circuit breakers in 30 days) at the end of 90 days will not go live. If the criteria are met early, they must stay met for the full period.
Why This Matters for Subscribers
When a strategy eventually goes live, subscribers receive signals based on an algorithm with a verified forward-tested track record — not a polished backtest. The live ramp-up is also conservative: the first 30 days after live approval use 25% of full position size before scaling to full size. Real capital is never the first test.