Paper trading (the dry-run)

And now, after forward testing, the next step I recommend is paper trading. 3Commas allows you to trade with paper money, thus protecting your capital until you see it rise due to your own abilities.

Always paper-trade new strategies until you are profitable for at least one month (though other traders would say one to three months).

You might ask yourself why do a forward test and then a paper trade; shouldn’t you just paper trade after the backtest?

My answer to you is that forward testing is not used to calculate the R, the profitability of the strategy, but to tune it some more against a real-life scenario.

After that, paper trading is where you actually put your strategy into practice, and this is the place where you’ll get as close to the real R as possible.