Best Paper Trading Apps

Do you feel like you should just jump in and start trading?

Pump the brakes there. 🛑 That’s a very bad idea—if you go in unprepared, you’re going to be blindsided by a lot of things. There’s a veritable flood of new traders entering the market—and most of them aren’t having much luck.

But you can avoid those all-too-common pitfalls with a very simple step. Open a paper trading account—that way, you can get a feel for trading, make note of your success and failures, before you actually commit any real money.

Paper trading accounts—or demo accounts—are a very common feature in the finance space. The appeal is clear—if a brokerage is confident about what they’re offering, they’ll let you have a test run, so to speak. If you like what you see, you’re much more likely to fund and open a live account.

More to the point, trading has always been a fast-paced activity—but nowadays, with the advent of global connectivity and instantaneous communication, it’s even faster. There’s no way to overstate the importance of a good, reliable, and reactive mobile app.

So, before you bite the bullet and commit to a brokerage, you should be very familiar with its platform, investment offerings, research capabilities, and much more—and all of that should also be viewed from the lens, or rather screen, of a mobile device.

Top Paper Trading Apps 🔍

Today, we’ll be taking you through six vetted, tried-and-tested brokerages—with a primary focus being on their paper trading mobile apps. Hopefully, we’ll manage to help you get a good idea of what kind of trading experience truly awaits you if you pick any of the brokers on our list.

1. eToro: Best Overall

As one of the pioneers of copy trading and social trading, eToro has made quite a name for itself since it was founded in Tel Aviv, way back in 2017. The brokerage is available to clients from a variety of countries, has a wide selection of investments on hand, and powerful research tools.

First things first—accessibility. You can open a demo account with eToro for free, and it allows you to trade in very realistically simulated market conditions with $100,000 in paper money.  Setting up a virtual account is quite quick and easy to do—simply sign up, log in to the platform, and select Virtual Portfolio from the top-left part of your screen.

So, what do you do if you wipe out your virtual account? No worries—you can contact customer support and reset the account value to any sum up to $100,000. 

One of the biggest differences between virtual trading and a real account is that paper trading usually gives you access to a lot of virtual cash. With $100,000 in paper money, you can open large positions, buy expensive stocks, and generally do a lot of things that you most likely won’t be able to recreate with a live account (unless you really have a lot of money saved up).

eToro took that into account, however. Just as you would contact customer support to reset your funds, you can also ask for the amount of virtual money in your paper trading account to be lowered to a minimum of $20,000.

Keep in mind, however, that fees don’t apply when you use the paper trading account—which will impact your overall returns. However, on the bright side, eToro’s renowned copy-trading feature is available with a demo account—and so are CFD trading and access to leverage.

eToro comes in at first place in our review because of a combination of factors. It offers unparalleled accessibility—it is available in over 140 countries, and has accumulated more than 20 million users. 

Opening a live account requires a modest initial deposit of $50. The paper trading app is sleek, intuitive, and optimized for mobile devices—and the addition of the copy-trading feature allows you to peer into the methodology of more experienced traders and prepares you for real-life market conditions from an entirely different angle.

As far as functionality goes, eToro has a very conspicuous lack of fundamental data—although short-term traders likely won’t mind, if you’re interested in long-term investing, this is a flaw that should be noted. Mind you, a flaw that can easily be remedied by using other sources of fundamental data—but a bothersome complication in any case.

eToro does also come with a few downsides—like the lack of fundamental data, these are quite minor in most cases. A $5 withdrawal fee, for example, or a $10 inactivity fee that is charged after a year of no activity.

However, when you factor in all the strong points of this brokerage, along with the fact that it charges next to nothing in brokerage fees, all the while offering access to a wide variety of assets, including stocks, ETFs, forex, commodities, indices, and cryptocurrencies, the flaws just pale in comparison. If all of this has piqued your interest, learn more in our in-depth review of eToro.

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2. Interactive Brokers: Best Investment Offerings

Founded in 1984, Interactive Brokers (IBKR) boasts more than 1 million registered accounts. It is one of the better known U.S—based brokerages, although it is available internationally.

The first unfortunate fact that we have to deal with is that if you want to open a demo account with Interactive Brokers, you must first open, approve, and fund a regular trading account.

Thankfully, when that is taken care of, it shouldn’t take more than 24 hours for your paper trading account to become available.

Interactive Brokers’ demo accounts give you $1,000,000 in virtual money. While we appreciate the freedom this allows for, it’s slightly excessive—to get a true overview of what market conditions might be like for you, we recommend using roughly as much money as you could actually set aside for trading or investing. 

Don’t go overboard here—IBKR’s demo account uses delayed market data, so you really don’t want to make the experience less realistic than it has to be. You can actually make use of live market data—but this requires you to pay the market data subscription on a live account, and run both a live and a demo session simultaneously—if that sounds too complicated, it’s because it is.

Be that as it may, Interactive Brokers does offer you access to what’s probably the widest variety of markets out of any broker—135 of them, to be exact, spread across 33 countries. The brokerage is one of the largest marketplaces of mutual funds—clients can access almost 35,000 mutual funds, 8,300 of which are transaction-free.

On top of that, IBKR supports fractional shares, beginner-friendly forex trading with 115 currency pairs, fixed-income securities from a variety of markets, as well as cryptocurrencies including BTC, ETH, along with crypto ETFs, indices, and derivatives. And to top that off, it is also a discount broker, so fees for all this are among the lowest you’ll run across if you activate your live account.

IBKR is one of the leading brokerages in today’s market—so it’s impossible to do them justice in such a short section—but if you’d like to find out more, our review of Interactive Brokers has you covered.

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3. TD Ameritrade: Best for U.S. Traders

TD Ameritrade is one of the world’s leading brokerages. It executes more than 800,000 trades per day, has more than 11 million clients, and since being acquired by Charles Schwab in 2019, it has also moved to a low-fee pricing structure.

TD Ameritrade offers a host of educational content, a powerful platform, as well as a well-designed mobile app—all of which can be accessed from the demo account. Coupled with the fact that there is no minimum deposit, it becomes increasingly clear why this brokerage is our top pick for U.S. traders.

TD Ameritrade’s paper trading app allows you to practice with $100,000 in virtual cash. On top of that, the paper trading account also gives you access to backtesting tools, margin, as well as the ability to trade futures and currencies (forex trading).

Thinkorswim is a lauded platform—and with good reason. The mobile app is quite well-designed—it manages to strike a careful balance between being user-friendly and full of features. The mobile app version allows clients to utilize complex order types, receive important economic news via CNBC and TD Ameritrade’s own news source. On top of that, the mobile app supports over 300 technical charts and indicators,

One of the few flaws associated with TD Ameritrade’s paper trading account is that you won’t receive real-time quotes—that is, unless you link the paper trading account to a TD Ameritrade account that has been funded with at least $500. Keep in mind that if you’re not a TD Ameritrade client, there is a time limit on how long you can use the paper trading account for—and it’s 60 days.

As far as the range of investments offered, TD Ameritrade is one of the best brokers on the market. It provides clients with access to over 4,100 no-transaction mutual funds, as well as commission-free trading for stocks, ETFs, and options. On top of the low fee structure, TD Ameritrade leverages its size to provide quite a lot in the way of accessibility—the account minimum is $0.

Another area where TD Ameritrade shines is education—the brokerage offers clients a variety of well-produced educational material, including articles, videos, webcasts, and tutorials. As far as customer service goes, the mobile app allows you to get in touch with a CS agent via chat—the responses are timely and quite helpful.

Of course, nothing is perfect—TD Ameritrade’s margin rates aren’t really competitive, and the brokerage charges high short-term fees for ETFs—but in the grand scheme of things, those are small prices to pay for all the benefits that this brokerage offers. If you’d like to get a closer look at the most important features of this brokerage, we’ve covered them in our review of TD Ameritrade.

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4. IG: Best for Beginners

IG is one of the UK’s premier brokers but it is available in a variety of countries. Founded in 1974 and regulated by the FCA, it is a fantastic choice for beginners due to how user-friendly and affordable it is—but the real kicker lies in the broker’s focus on education.

Traders can make use of both IG’s proprietary platform and MetaTrader 4, but for the purposes of this review, we’ll be covering IG’s platform. Signing up for the demo account is a piece of cake—all you need is an email address and a phone number. On top of that, there is no minimum deposit requirement—even for opening a live account.

The mobile app is very well designed—it has no major issues to speak of, and to be frank, we couldn’t even find any minor issues. However, the paper-trading experience with IG isn’t as realistic as it could be. Your trades won’t be affected by factors such as out-of-hours price movements and slippage, and your demo account will not be charged for chart packages, unlike a live account.

On top of that, your trades cannot be rejected on the basis of size or price—they will only be rejected if you don’t have enough virtual money to execute them. Another important thing to mention is that if you don’t have enough money to cover margin, your trades won’t be closed—and a false sense of security is the last thing you need in a situation that should prepare you for a margin call.

However, that is evened out by the fact that IG is one of the best brokers for educating yourself—it gives clients access to webinars, platform tutorials, and educational videos. You’ll also get access to trading ideas and powerful charting tools—however, we do have to note a rather conspicuous lack of fundamental data. If you’re interested in what IG has to offer, we’ve covered it a bit more in-depth in our review of IG.

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5. TradeStation: Best for Education

TradeStation is a brokerage with history—this venerable business was founded way back in 1982 and is still in operation. But it isn’t old-fashioned by any means—in fact, TradeStation has adapted to the low-cost fee structures of the competition and has even managed to produce top-tier educational material for new traders.

The brokerage offers multiple account types—the TS Go account is available with no minimum deposit requirement, while the TS select account type requires a minimum deposit of $2,000.

TradeStation’s mobile app is chock full of features—it wouldn’t be too far off to say that it offers as much functionality as the desktop platform. Traders can select paper trading from the login screen—no matter what device they may be accessing the platform from.

We’ve chosen TradeStation this list because of its great educational resources. TradeStation University gives clients access to a wide variety of resources, including articles, tutorials, e-books, webinars, and educational videos.

The broker gives clients access to commission-free trades for stocks and ETFs—if you’re interested in trading options, however, you’ll be subject to a $0.6 fee if using a TS Select account, and a $0.5 fee if using a TS Go account. Speaking of options, the brokerage also comes with access to OptionStation Pro—a fantastic piece of software that allows you to analyze and implement strategies.

As good as the mobile app is, it has a few flaws that are a bit jarring. The app doesn’t support alerts and watchlists. Apart from that, it has no flaws to speak of—but the absence of such elementary features in an otherwise impressive mobile app is quite strange. If you’d like to know more, take a look at our TradeStation review.

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6. Webull: Best for Commission-Free Trading

Founded in 2017, WeBull’s low-cost approach to trading has managed to secure an impressive set of results—in just 4 years, they’ve managed to get over 11 million registered users. Let’s get down to the features that made that success possible.

Keep in mind that as accessible as it is, WeBull offers next to nothing in the way of education. This can be remedied by using other sources but is still a flaw that is worth mentioning. Along with that, investors who want to put their money in mutual funds should look elsewhere—WeBull does not offer mutual funds.

Although the brokerage is slightly lacking when it comes to market analysis and commentary, WeBull’s app does come with access to a stock screener, a news section, various analyst ratings, as well as a variety of other features including serious charting tools.

The app is well-designed, easy to navigate, and responsive. In fact, the user experience closely mirrors that of the web-based and desktop platforms and blows similar apps such as Robinhood’s out of the water, feature-wise. Webull’s paper trading account offers all of the functionality that a live account does.

WeBull also earns high marks when it comes to the range of investment offerings—clients can trade stocks, fractional stocks, options, and exchange-traded funds. If that isn’t enough (and it may well not be, seeing as how the brokerage does not support fixed-income securities, futures, and mutual funds), you can always take solace in the fact that WeBull also allows you to trade cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, Dash, and Ethereum, among others. If these features sound appealing, learn more about the pros and cons of WeBull.

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How to Rate a Paper Trading App 🏛️

We’re done with the list and the mini-reviews. If you’d like to learn more, we’ve covered all of these brokerages separately in their own in-depth reviews.

But, just like you won’t know what it feels like to use a platform without a paper trading account, you won’t be able to tell if a broker is the right one for you if you don’t know what to look for.

In the following sections, we’re going to outline the most important factors that separate good brokers from the very best—these are all elements that you should always consider before making a final decision and getting the perfect paper trading account for your needs.

Opening an Account 👤

Nowadays, most brokerages support a fully-digital account opening process. This usually entails two steps: opening the account, which can usually be done within a matter of minutes, and verifying it—which usually takes a while longer. At the highest (or worst) end of the spectrum, verifying an account can even take a couple of weeks.

But before you worry about getting your account verified, make sure that it is available in your country. Most brokerages do this for you—either you will be redirected when you access the web page, or they will clearly state on their website where their services can be used from.

The verification process that a vast majority of the best brokerages require entails providing proof of identity via a government-issued document—this can be an I.D., driver’s license, or passport for example, as well as a proof of address—such as a recent utility bill or bank statement.

Keep in mind, however, that this process can vary depending on where you’re signing up from. Most online sources will only go over the account opening process for U.S.-based clients—but if you’re from another country, you might have to prepare a few additional documents. For example, if you want to buy shares in India, you might be required to present a PAN card from the Income Tax Department, or perhaps a Demat account.

Be that as it may, you should also factor in that quite a lot of brokerages offer multiple account types. Some come with conditions, for example, they can require larger minimum deposits—or a certain amount of trading volume over a certain period of time. The fee structure can differ from account type to account type, and so can commissions, spreads, and a host of other factors—so do your research ahead of time.

Selection of Investments 💸

Obviously, when you’re looking at the selection of investments that a brokerage has on offer, you’re likely going to focus primarily on the asset classes that you’re interested in. But keep in mind that what interests you now might not line up with what will interest you in six months, a year, two years…

Sure, it’s important to find a broker that has what you’re looking for at the moment—if you’re interested in ETFs, you’d want a broker that offers a lot of them. But when it comes to the range of investment offerings, as the old saying goes, the more the merrier.

As a general rule, if you’re a beginner, we’d counsel you to stick with low-risk securities—primarily blue-chip or large-cap stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, along with bonds and other fixed-income securities.

But once you get some notches under your belt, the ability to trade other asset classes, such as derivatives like futures, swaps, and options might very well come in handy. On top of that, if you’ve been following the news at all for the last couple of years, you’re probably well aware of how appealing the rapidly-growing cryptocurrency market is.

Keep in mind, however, that it isn’t only important how many asset classes are represented in the broker’s offering—but how they are represented, too. To put it more simply, don’t just look for a broker that offers let’s say stocks, ETFs, bonds, and cryptocurrencies—pay attention to how many stocks, funds, and different cryptos they have on offer. If you’re interested in forex trading, take a close look at how many currency pairs the brokerage offers. 

When it comes to stocks, you should also consider how many different exchanges a brokerage will give you access to. It pays to get this stuff right on the first try—switching brokerages, even with a quick ACAT transfer, is a long, tiring, and unwieldy process—you’re much better off avoiding it entirely if you can.

Features and Functionality 🧰

Primarily, when we talk about features and functionality, we’re talking about the availability of technical indicators and various charting and drawing tools. Charting tools, in particular, are of the utmost importance to anyone that’s looking to engage in any sort of short-term trading—be it day trading or news trading. Other than that, access to an informative and easy-to-digest news section is a top priority for swing traders.

Other areas of interest include access to fundamental data for long-term, buy-and-hold investors, fast and reliable execution of trades, access to complex order types, as well as real-time market data.

However, it’s hard to tell what the right balance will be for you. And it’s a difficult line to tread—too many features and you’re likely to succumb to information overload or so-called analysis paralysis. On the other hand, too few features means you won’t be able to prepare yourself for the experience of trading with a live account in real market conditions.

All of this is all the more important when it comes to mobile apps. The inescapable fact of a small screen size automatically means that you have to cram more of everything in a smaller area—charts, news feeds, research tools, and everything else. 

A mobile app can easily become unwieldy and difficult to navigate if it isn’t properly designed—and while seasoned veterans might be able to make sense of all that mess, most beginner and intermediate traders simply won’t be able to. Also, keep in mind that a mobile app does not automatically mirror the speed and reliability of desktop or web-based platforms—research each of these options and measure them by their own merits.

Is the Broker as Good as the Paper Trading App? 🤔

There is also an important factor that we should mention—even the best paper trading apps can only go so far in preparing you for what actual trading is like. This is due to a variety of reasons—some are purely technical, while others are a bit more psychological.

Let’s begin with the technical side of things—orders that are placed on a demo account more-or-less always have flawless execution. But real-life conditions aren’t always optimal, so you’re likely going to experience a phenomenon known as slippage. 

In simple terms, slippage means that your orders, or at least a portion of your orders, won’t be executed at the stated price—but at the nearest possible price. In theory, this shouldn’t cause too much of an issue—but in practice, it can easily eat into your profits or cause tight trades to be unprofitable.

Second of all, demo accounts usually allow you to trade with a decent sum of simulated money—with $10,000 being the norm. This amount of capital allows you to open large positions, purchase expensive securities, and all sorts of other things—things that you might not necessarily be able to do with the amount of real money you have stashed away for trading.

As far as the emotional side of things goes, although paper trading might offer a reasonably realistic approximation of the trading experience, it cannot truly recreate what happens inside your head when you’re trading and therefore risking real money. This topic is called trading psychology or market psychology—and you should definitely be aware of it so that you can prevent yourself from making unnecessary knee-jerk mistakes.

Pricing 💰

There’s no going around this unfortunate fact—price plays a huge role when deciding which brokerage to go for. There are a lot of brokerages out there—and some will be beyond your means (at least for the time being).

There are a couple of different factors that should be mentioned here. First and foremost is the minimum deposit requirement associated with a brokerage. If you can’t afford it, you’re out of luck. However, if a brokerage seems just slightly out of reach, it might be worth it to take a few months and put some extra effort into budgeting and saving.

With that out of the way, the second most important issue is fees. Fees are divided into two categories—trading fees, or commissions, and non-trading fees. In general, most of the best online brokerages are moving away from non-trading fees. These include account maintenance fees, wire transfer charges, deposit and withdrawal fees, and inactivity fees.

As far as commissions go, you should take a close look at the fee schedule of all the brokers that you’re interested in. And we mean a close look—don’t overlook the commissions that are charged for asset classes that you don’t currently plan on trading.

When it comes to brokerages that deal in other types of assets, such as forex trading or options contracts, it’s also important to factor in the leverage available to clients, as well as whether or not trading on margin is available, and what the conditions tied to margin trading are.

However, keep in mind that plenty of brokerages offer multiple account types. This may or may not be reflected in their paper trading accounts, but you’ll certainly have to do an in-depth comparison between fee schedules and account types to get the optimal result for your needs.

Regulation and Reliability 📝

All of the brokerages that we’ve reviewed today are regulated by top-tier institutions tied to some of the most powerful national governments in the world. That’s all fine and good for the brokers on this list, but one single fact bears repeating—always, and we mean always, check if a brokerage is regulated before you do anything else. 

Not all regulatory licenses are equal—so-called tier-one licenses, which are given by the regulatory bodies of well-developed economies such as the US, UK, and Australia carry much more weight than regulatory licenses given by off-shore agencies.

Unlicensed and unregulated brokerages aren’t automatically fraudulent—but all fraudulent brokerages are unlicensed and unregistered. And although you might think that avoiding these scams is easy, you’d be wrong. Even internet-savvy younger generations tend to disregard some red flags when an offer seems like an easy way to make money.

Some markets are unfortunately more targeted by bad-faith actors than others are. Any sort of fast-paced and highly-technical market, such as forex, penny stocks, and pink sheets or OTC penny stocks in particular is much more susceptible to scams. But don’t be fooled—fraud can pop up anywhere, as we can see from a July 2021 scam from India that defrauded clients by using dummy corporations claiming to offer access to the wine and spice markets.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about legitimate brokerages. Even a licensed, regulated broker might not automatically be trustworthy. You should always keep your ear to the ground (or Google News)—try to find if the brokerage in question has been involved in any scandals or regulatory infractions, whether or not they were ever fined by regulatory bodies, and what the general impression is among people who are already their clients.

Education and Research 🔬

Although the internet is full of educational sources (surprise surprise), it can be hard to sift through that mass of information and separate truly well-written and well-produced sources that are backed up by research from something that merely seems trustworthy.

Obviously, we’re not knocking online sources of knowledge and research—hey, we fit into that category. But the educational and research services that the best brokerages on the market offer always have to pass stringent quality control and are usually written by experts that have decades of experience in their respective fields of study and specialization.

How much education a broker can offer you is one of the most important elements of how accessible, user-friendly, and beginner-friendly it is. Keep in mind, however, that some brokers choose to disregard educational material, while others have a strong focus on it—it stands to reason that, if you’re a beginner, it’s quite handy to go for a broker with solid educational resources.

The educational content that brokerages provide is usually quite varied—it can include articles, quizzes, webinars, courses, and tutorials that deal with various topics, along with platform tutorials.

When we talk about research in this context, we usually mean market analysis and trading ideas—these are either produced by an in-house team of experts or provided by a dedicated third-party research provider.

Research allows you to stay in touch with the latest goings-on in the market—and having a good idea of what market sentiment is like at the moment is a big advantage. Trading ideas allow you to both make use of good opportunities and gradually broaden your horizons by absorbing the methodology of the experts that recommend those courses of action. We’d also put copy trading in this category as something of a bridge between hands-on education and trading ideas.

Supported Payment Methods 📞

Payment methods play a big role in how accessible a brokerage will end up being. Payment methods such as wire transfers, credit cards, and debit cards are quite commonplace. However, the more the merrier—you have to keep in mind that banking infrastructure isn’t as developed everywhere in the world.

Of course, you should always begin with the conventional—so check whether or not a brokerage supports these commonplace payment methods from your country. Online payment methods in the way of e-wallets such as PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, and Payoneer offer a simple, hassle-free way to fund your account. 

These methods are generally much more accessible when looking at the big picture—so that feature can either be a nice bonus or make or break a brokerage’s accessibility, depending on your location of residence.

Although the methods by which you can fund your account are by no doubt the most important factor, you should also keep in mind that withdrawal methods can also play a large role. The option to withdraw money by a variety of means adds a nice bit of flexibility—and more and more brokerages are offering withdrawals via crypto. When looking at withdrawal methods, make a note of whether or not any (or all) of the withdrawal methods will incur a fee.

Conclusion 🏁

We’ve reached the end—thank you for sticking by us, even though the guide might not have exactly been a page-turner. Paper trading is an essential step that must be taken before you can become a successful trader, and the importance of mobile apps in today’s day and age cannot be overstated.

Picking out the right brokerage, let alone the right app isn’t easy. But we sincerely hope these sneak-peaks at certain brokerages, as well as the buyers guide will help you more easily quantify what it is exactly that you’re looking for.