The five paper trades checklist before going live
Backtest done, alerts wired, account funded. The last gate is five paper trades, and they are not a formality: each one exists to catch a specific failure before real money meets it.
Five observed executions is the minimum that exercises the whole pipeline, signal, transmission, fill, exit, and accounting, under live market conditions. The checklist is what each trade must prove.
Trade one: the signal fires and arrives
The alert triggers on the condition it was built for and reaches the execution bridge intact, payload parsed, instrument and direction correct, the wiring in webhook alerts and the alert JSON setup. Most first failures are plumbing: malformed JSON, wrong ticker mapping, a strategy-versus-indicator alert mismatch per the alert types breakdown.
Trade two: the fill resembles the backtest's assumption
Compare paper fill to signal price: the gap is your real slippage, and it must sit inside what the backtest charged, the assumptions from realistic costs. A live gap larger than the modeled one quietly deletes the edge.
Trade three: the exits execute themselves
Stop and target land at the computed levels without a human touching anything, including once while you are deliberately away from the screen. The common live-only bugs, session-boundary behavior and order-type quirks, are cataloged in common Pine mistakes.
Trade four: the EOD guard proves itself
For futures presets, hold a position into the flatten window and verify it closes before settlement, because the entire close-to-close sizing model from sizing off the limit rests on that guard firing. Swing presets verify the hardcoded TP and SL instead.
Trade five: the accounting reconciles
Logged entry, exit, costs and P&L match the platform's record to the tick, and the trade journal entry is complete, the discipline from the trading plan. If any trade fails its check: fix, and restart the count from one. Five consecutive clean executions is the gate, and the patience it demands is the cheapest insurance in the whole pipeline, the broader onboarding in the passing guide.
FAQ
Why five paper trades and not one?
Because the pipeline has five distinct failure surfaces: signal transmission, fill quality, autonomous exits, the end-of-day guard, and accounting. One trade cannot exercise them all, and the count restarts after any failure.
What if a paper trade fails its check?
Fix the specific failure and restart the count from one. Five consecutive clean executions is the gate; four clean plus one patched does not prove the patch.
Do I need paper trades if the backtest is solid?
Yes. The backtest validates the rules; paper trades validate the plumbing between the rules and the broker, which is where most first-week live failures actually live.
Not financial advice. Performance figures are hypothetical, modeled outputs (12-month sample; ~1,500-path Monte Carlo where noted). Past performance does not guarantee future results. Verify every prop-firm rule with the firm directly.