Why We Paper Trade First: A Public Simulated Record
Every QuantaEdge strategy is forward-tested on simulated paper accounts, in public. This is not a limitation — it is the entire point.
Correction (October 7, 2026). An earlier version of this post called the record “verified”, gave its start as June 1, and described graduation criteria and a live ramp-up for subscribers. No independent party verifies the record; it starts June 2, 2026; those criteria were never the gate actually used; and no strategy trades live. Research verdicts now come from tests whose rules are written down before the results are seen.
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 prices come from live market data, the timestamps are recorded, and the outcome is not revised after the fact.
What Paper Trading 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. Simulated fills are marked at quoted prices; a real order would also pay spreads and slippage, which we estimate separately and show next to the gross figure.
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 the market reported in real time. We do not round up winners or exclude losers.
The June 2, 2026 Reset
The current track record started June 2, 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.
What the Record Can and Cannot Show
A forward record shows how a strategy behaves on data nobody had seen when it was built. It cannot show that the strategy will make money: short records are usually statistically indistinguishable from zero.