Start with a paper bot — learn the whole thing with fake money first
Run a real strategy in simulation, watch how it grades and trades, then flip to live only when you're ready.
The fastest way to trust an autonomous trading bot is to watch it work before it touches your money. That's exactly what a paper bot is for. You pick a strategy, deploy a bot in simulated mode, and it runs the full loop — 24/7, with fake capital — so you can see how it thinks before you ever go live.
Nothing about the engine changes between paper and live. Same strategy, same graded cards, same entries, targets, stops, and risk rules. The only difference is the money isn't real yet.
What a paper bot actually does
When you start a bot, you first choose a strategy — a lens made of assets, directions, and timeframes. It might be a curated basket like Semiconductors or Crypto Majors, a public-record tracker like Congress or insider buys, or one you built yourself in the StrategyStudio.
From there, the loop is the same one live bots run. Soar's engine grades every setup the strategy produces against live technicals and your risk rules. Only the ones that clear the bar become trade cards — each with an entry, two targets, a stop, a plain-English thesis, and a conviction score. Your paper bot then trades those cards with simulated capital, sizing each position to the risk profile you picked.
What you learn, risk-free
Watching a paper bot for a week or two teaches you more than any explainer. You see which setups clear the grade and which get filtered out. You see how conservative, standard, and aggressive risk profiles size positions differently. And you see the strategy's rhythm — how often it fires, how it handles a stop, how it banks a target.
How the engine grades and rejects setups in real time
How your risk profile controls position size, concentration caps, and max open positions
That the bot only ever opens new positions from graded cards — it never touches what you already hold
How stops and targets play out, so a red trade doesn't surprise you when it's real
A paper bot isn't a demo — it's the real engine, running the real strategy, just with practice capital.
Custody stays yours the whole time
One thing worth knowing early: your broker keys never touch Soar. They live only inside your own bot's runtime — a Cloudflare Worker you own for spot brokers, or your own server for Interactive Brokers and Webull. The bot signs its own orders. Soar can read what your bot reports, but it can never move your funds. That's true in paper mode and it's true in live mode.
Flipping to live when you're ready
There's no rush and no penalty for watching. When the strategy has earned your confidence and you understand how it behaves, you flip the same bot from paper to live. It keeps running the strategy you already trust — now on real capital, with a broker-side stop protecting the downside and Soar monitoring the targets.
If you'd rather see a strategy's track record before you even deploy, the community lets you browse published strategies with real, realized results — banked targets and clean stops, no backtests. And if you get stuck at any step, the Copilot can walk you through building a strategy or deploying a bot inside the app.
Start a paper bot, let it run, and watch the whole loop for yourself before anything's on the line.
