This article was originally published on the FlyTradr blog . Paper Trading vs Live Trading: Why Your Results Will Always Differ Paper trading is the step between backtesting and live trading. You run your strategy in real market conditions, with real prices and real market hours, but without any actual money at risk. It is a genuinely useful tool, and it should be a required step in any systematic trader's validation process. But paper trading will never perfectly replicate live trading performa