---
title: 'TradingView Paper Trading Tutorial For Beginners (2026)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=_o-e4SqaieQ'
video_id: '_o-e4SqaieQ'
date: 2026-07-27
duration_sec: 1770
---

# TradingView Paper Trading Tutorial For Beginners (2026)

> Source: [TradingView Paper Trading Tutorial For Beginners (2026)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_o-e4SqaieQ)

## Summary

This tutorial covers how to set up a free TradingView paper trading account, understand basic chart elements, use technical indicators like SMA, and place trades with stop-loss and take-profit orders. It is designed for complete beginners.

### Key Points

- **Introduction and Setup** [00:01] — Ryan Scribner introduces TradingView, a charting platform used by over 100 million people. He explains how to paper trade with a free account using real-time market data without risking real money.
- **Create Free Account** [00:28] — Click the link in the description to sign up for a free account (no credit card required). You can sign up with Google, social profiles, or email. The free plan allows paper trading.
- **Paper Trading Settings** [02:56] — Access the paper trading panel and configure account balance (default $100,000), margin control, leverage (set crypto to 1:1), commissions (optional), and ability to reset account.
- **Chart Basics** [07:43] — Learn the symbol search (e.g., AAPL), Open/High/Low/Close (OHLC) values, volume (VOL), and how to switch between candlestick and line charts.
- **Candlestick Chart Explanation** [11:53] — Candlesticks show open, close, high, low. Green means close higher than open, red means lower. The wick shows the high and low of the period.
- **Technical Indicators: SMA** [15:19] — Add Simple Moving Average (SMA) from the indicators menu. SMA 9 (9-day) shows average price over 9 periods. It can act as support or resistance.
- **Placing a Trade** [17:56] — Switch to Bitcoin (Coinbase data). Use limit order to specify price (e.g., $75,000) or market order for immediate fill at best price. Set quantity (e.g., 0.1 BTC).
- **Take Profit and Stop Loss** [23:22] — Drag TP line to desired profit level (e.g., 9-day SMA) and SL line to loss limit (e.g., recent low). Confirm orders to set them. They auto-execute when price is reached.
- **Order History and Balance** [26:36] — View order history and balance history to track trades. The example shows a realized loss of $16.14, reducing balance from $100,000 to $99,983.86.
- **Next Steps and Mistakes to Avoid** [27:04] — Practice with realistic amounts (e.g., $10,000), place 10 trades to learn platform. Avoid using unrealistic leverage or risking entire account. Remember paper trading lacks real emotions.

### Conclusion

Paper trading is a risk-free way to learn trading, but it lacks real emotions; users should practice with realistic settings and avoid bad habits. The tutorial provides a solid foundation for beginners to start their trading journey.

## Transcript

trading and charting platform that's used by over 100 million people going to be showing you how to paper trade using their free account with live real-time market data, all while risking zero dollars of actual investment
capital. We're going to be covering the account settings that you need to know, candlestick chart basics, an introduction to technical indicators, how to place a trade, stop-loss, take-profit orders, [music] and more.
keeping this to a level that complete beginners can understand. And if you appreciate that, make sure you drop a like on this video and subscribe. I just financial advisor and this isn't personalized financial advice. With that
said, guys, let's jump into the full tutorial now, and feel free to skip ahead with the table of contents below. [music] The first step here is to click the top link in the description below or visit ryanscribner.com/tradingview.
invitation page here for TradingView where you can get $15 off a paid plan. But, as mentioned, you can use the free plan, no credit card required for paper trading, which is exactly what we're going to do. So, for now, we're going to
click here on the X, and you can see here it says get started for free. We're going to go ahead and click on that. And then over here, you can see the option for $0 forever, no credit card required. So, we're going to click on this sign up
button, and then you'll have multiple options here for how you create your account. You can simply use a Google account, or you can use these other social profiles, or if you'd rather make an account with just a traditional email
and password, you can click on that and do that here. Now, I already have an Google account, and then we will proceed your free account here, you're going to be able to access it by going to
tradingview.com and simply logging in. And then one thing I want to mention here quick is that there is a desktop and app-based version of this platform. If we go over here to more and then downloads, we can see the desktop app
actually going to be utilizing their web-based platform, and you access that by hovering over products and then clicking on supercharts. And this is going to be your workspace where you can view price charts, apply technical
indicators, create drawings, set alerts, and even place trades with connected brokerage accounts. We're going to be focused on the paper trading side of that you can actually connect TradingView to your brokerage account or
crypto exchanges and actually execute trades through the TradingView terminal here, and it will take place over in your brokerage account or your exchange. If we click on trade here in the top right, it's going to bring up a list of
all of the supported brokerage accounts and exchanges. But for now, what we're going to do is click here on paper trading in the top left, and that's going to allow us to connect to the paper trading simulator, and we can now
see that that populates here at the bottom of the screen. So, just like account, and there's a few important details I want to cover. First of all, if you look here where it says account balance, it shows $100,000.
you can actually trade with, but you can actually change this to a different amount of money or reset it later on if you use your paper trading account and beginning. And if we click over here on this gear icon, this is going to bring
up some important settings for our paper trading account that I want to cover notice here is this margin control checkbox. This is where you can check the box, and if you do this, this is going to add simulated margin control
and leverage requirements. For example, you could actually face a margin call if you have this enabled. If you're looking to practice trading with margin, I would recommend checking this box because it's going to make this as realistic of a
trading environment as possible, but since we're not going to be using any leverage or margin here, I'm just going to leave this box unchecked. Now, one thing I am going to change while we're in here is where it says crypto 10 to 1.
So, notice how stocks is 1 to 1. That just means that for every dollar that you trade, you're going to control $1 worth of a stock. Basically, $1 buys you a dollar. You're not using any margin or leverage. With 10 to 1 selected, that
means that $1 invested is going to control $10 worth of the crypto, and we're actually going to be trading Bitcoin later on here as an example. So, I'm just going to set this here at 1 to 1, that way we are not deploying any
extra buying power when placing those trades. And then below that, you have commissions, which can again make this a more realistic trading environment. So, depending on where you're watching this video from and what you plan on trading,
commissions. So, for example, if we check this box here, you can assign a per contract commission for futures and options trading. This is commonly about $0.65, so you might come down here and say, "Hey, I'm putting a $0.65 per
contract commission in place on futures and options." That way, when you're actually placing these paper trades, that commission comes out of your trade, realistic environment for you. But, we're not going to be doing futures or
unchecked for now. But, if you also want to add other types of commissions here, you can check this box and either add a fixed dollar amount commission to stock and crypto trades, for example. So,
maybe you want it to be $1 per trade, you would set it just like that as a fixed commission. Or, if you want it to be a percentage, you can change this to percent, and then you could assign a percentage here to your trading. Now,
with crypto trading, this might actually be a good thing to add because you generally you pay a commission there, and it's often a percentage of the advanced platform, this could be anywhere from 0.1% to maybe 0.5%
in terms of what you're paying as a commission. And if you're using a beginner platform that has higher spread and higher commissions, that could be a 1 or a 2% commission here on those trades. So, you can go ahead and enable
this commission feature if you want, but I'm just going to leave this unchecked for now, and we're going to assume it's a commission-free trading environment. now is what happens if you click on this reset account button. This is where you
can reset to a clean account from the beginning, deleting all of your previous activity, but it's also where you can change the dollar amount that you start with a hundred thousand dollars, if you want it to be less or possibly more, you
can adjust that here. And also, if you are using a different currency, you can change this over to your local currency over here in this section. But, we're going to click here on cancel. We're not going to reset for now. The only thing
we changed is making crypto a one-to-one, and then we're just going to click on the save button, and those are the settings that we want to apply to we look at the actual charts here, I want to show you how to put this into
dark mode, and this is all based on personal preference here. I personally settings, and then if I get into practicing trading, I will use the dark mode. You're going to do that up here by
clicking on your icon associated with your account, and then you can just toggle on dark theme, and now we have a dark version of the screen, which is with when it comes to looking at charting and trading terminals like
this. So, let's talk about the chart now, because as a complete beginner, to you, but it's really just because you have a ton of different elements down one at a time, it's actually a lot simpler. So, for starters, I changed
this over to Apple because this is what you're probably going to be seeing here first time because that's what it typically shows. And if you want to here in the search bar and you can type in the symbol or you can select between
stocks, crypto, indices, etc., bonds, and then do things that way. But right now we are looking at AAPL, which is the symbol, and this trades here on the Nasdaq. Now, to the right of that, you're going to see an O, H, L and a C.
That's going to stand for the open, the high, the low, and the close, and that's all going to be price activity here for the stock. Now, right now the market is open, so these numbers can change around except for the open price, but I want to
show you a screenshot that I took here yesterday on a Sunday, and we're just going to go over that information real quick. Now, this was showing us data for the previous trading day, which was a Friday, and the stock opened at 297.90,
reached a high of 303.20, a low of reached a high of 303.20, a low of 296.52, and then closed at $300.23. to see a dollar value. In this case, it was plus $2.02.
That's the amount that the stock went up that day, and it's commonly expressed as a percentage, which you'll see to the right of that. So, on Friday, Apple stock went up by 0.68%. So, just keep this in the back of your
the candlestick chart here shortly, those variables are going to come back into the equation. Now, below that, you're going to see a sell and a buy button here. This is a buy market and sell market button. It's just a shortcut
for a market order, and a market order basically means fill my order immediately at the best available price. But a lot of traders are actually going to use something called a limit order instead, and I'm going to explain what
limit order is just going to give you control over the price that your order actually executes at, which is extremely trading strategies. Below those buttons, we're going to see
a VOL and it currently says uh well, it was hovering over one of these candles from before. So, if I move it to today's number, we can see VOL of 7.75M. That means that 7,750,000 shares have actually traded hands so far
today, and that's just the total number of shares that have either been bought or sold, referred to as the volume. If we move it back one candle here to Friday's data, we can see just under 55 million shares traded hands that day.
And that volume chart is going to correspond with this bar chart that we going to give you a visual representation of how many shares traded hands and whether it was a day where the price went up or the price went down.
Looking at the bottom here, the higher the bar, the more shares traded hands. And if it's a green bar, that means there was more buyers than sellers and bar, there were more sellers than there were buyers and the price went down.
Volume can more or less be looked at as pressure on the price of a stock. And pressure there could be in the upward direction or the downward direction. So, month of May at the beginning, we can see that there were multiple big green
bars in a row here and the stock went up from, let's say, around 270 up to about $280 a share. And it was right after there were two big days of uh a lot of
normal. So, you can see how that pressure can play out with a price move. bottom here, there's a little E. If we click on that, that is actually an earnings report. So, Apple had reported earnings here. And as we can see here,
they reported a beat here on both revenue and earnings per share, which was above Wall Street expectations or estimates, and that resulted in a lot of buying volume, and then the price of the stock went up as a result. Volume is one
have to understand here with any active trading strategies, and that's why it is so prominent here on the standard chart view. But now, let's talk about these individual bars here up top with the lines, which are referred to as candles,
And we're going to switch this now over to the year-to-date view just because helpful for us to determine what's going on here. Now, a lot of beginners, when they see the candlestick chart, get very confused because they don't know what
familiar with something like a line chart. Well, you can actually change this over to a line chart very easily. You'd come over here, and you would these candles, and then you would just select line, and just like that, we have
a basic line chart showing us what has been going on with the stock performance. A line chart is just going to show you the closing price of a stock over a certain period of time. But the thing is, that's only part of the story
here because that's only showing you the closing price. If you think back to what we talked about earlier, the stock has an open price, a high, a low, and a closing price for the day, and a candlestick chart is basically just
for you, and give you all of that information in one single chart. So, if we switch this back over again here to the candles, we're going to talk about what this actually means. Let's take a look at this candle here for Friday, May
want to point out is that the color of the candle represents whether it was um a higher close or a lower close from the open that day. So, in this case, it's a green candle, meaning the stock closed higher than the open, and then a red
lower than the open for that trading day. So, the first thing I want to mention here is that the bottom of the candle represents the open price for that trading day. So, in this case, it was about 278.70,
maybe plus or minus a couple of cents. And then the top of the solid bar represents the close price for the day, which was probably around $280. So, that's what the solid part of the candle means, but you're also going to
notice a line that goes above it and below it. This is referred to as the wick or the shadow, and this is just going to show you the high of the trading day and the low of the trading day. So, in this case, the bottom of
that wick wasn't too far below where it opened. It shows maybe around 278.12, but the top of that went all the way up here to around $287, give or take. So, that's how these candlestick charts work, and it's
picture here of the open, the close, the high, and the low, and all of that data is very important here to active traders because there are going to be potential patterns and things that show up in the charts, and then technical analysis is
conducted to essentially try to predict what the future price moves will be going to tell you right now that technical analysis is not a perfect science, and it's far from it.
Otherwise, every trader out there would have a infinite money printing machine, but that's essentially what people do here is look for patterns in the charts. They pay attention to what's going on with the volume as well, and they try to
future based on what they're seeing in the charts today. They combine a candlestick chart like we're looking at right here, showing the full picture of the trading activity for the asset, with the volume chart as well, and then they
also layer in something else called technical indicators, which we're going guys, if you've gotten any value out of this video so far, make sure you drop a like and subscribe if you haven't already. All right, so technical
indicators are different types of lines and elements that you can layer onto your chart. And this is going to help to analyze price movements, trends, momentum, and more. As far as where you will locate those, it's going to be
right here where it says indicators. And if we click on that, you're going to see all sorts of different types of technical indicators that you can add to your chart. And this is going to be one of the widest selections available. Now,
I'm going to teach you one of the most basic ones, which is called the SMA or simple moving average. So, what we're going to do here is type in simple, and here simple moving average. So, we're going to go ahead and click on that. And
then if we close out of this, you're going to notice a blue line was now added to our chart. And in addition, in the top left of our chart below volume, the top left of our chart below volume, we can now see SMA 9 close, and it says
to the right of that. So, what exactly does this mean? The simple moving average is one of the most basic and popular technical indicators out there, and it shows you the average price of an asset over a certain number of time
periods. So, right now we're looking at SMA 9, which is going to be a 9-day time frame. But other popular time frames for simple moving averages include the 20, simple moving averages include the 20, the 50, and the 200-day SMA. So, people
will often look at this over different spans of time. Now, one of the reasons moving average is because the stock or bounce off of this line, which is referred to as support. If we take a
look here at Apple stock, we can see multiple instances here where the stock dropped to that simple moving average, and then bounced off of that. But you can also see times when it slipped below that, and this is when that line
actually becomes what's called resistance. Learning about support and resistance areas is probably one of the best things to get started with as a complete beginner learning technical analysis. But we're not going to get too
trying to cover the basics of paper trading and it's not a dedicated video about technical analysis. But that's the basics of what you might want to understand here is that this is going to become a line here that is going to be a
support at times, but also a resistance for the asset if it slips below that and we can see how that has played out here in the charts. And you're also going to find that to be the case often with different time frames looking at
different SMAs like the 20, the 50, and the 200. So now it's time for the fun part, which is actually placing a trade. So what we're going to do now is switch this over to Bitcoin for our example. So we're going to click where it says AAPL.
I'm going to delete this and I'm just going to type in Bitcoin and we're going to see a number of different options here. For example, we can see the current spot price on Coinbase, on Bitstamp, on Binance, Kraken. So
depending on where you plan to trade, you can get the live pricing data from that exact exchange. So I'm going to choose Coinbase here and select this option here and that's bringing us the live price now for Bitcoin from the
Coinbase exchange. And we still have that 9-day simple moving average turned on and you can see another example here of how this does follow that trend line, bounces off of that trend line as support pretty close to it and then in
this case it slipped below it and then up here we have definitely broken trend and have now gone far below that 9-day SMA. So that's how this can be useful to see what's going on with the price and tracking those support and resistance
areas. Now at the bottom right here of the screen, we can see the actual price for Bitcoin updating in real time and this is the real pricing data coming from the Coinbase exchange and we can see it's changing around here every
couple of seconds. And then to the left of that, we're going to see the order ticket window. This is one of the places where you can execute a trade, but there's also going to be multiple shortcuts as well across different areas
of the screen. So, underneath where it says order, you have the option to sell or buy, and when you click on this, it's going to change the color at the bottom representing whether you are looking at a sell order or a buy order to make this
dummy proof to be honest, because you would be amazed how often people might make mistakes not realizing that they have a sell order versus a buy order in place. So, we're looking to buy, which is what we have selected, and by default
we have it set to a market order, but I actually want to talk to you about the limit order first, and that is where you can actually specify the exact price or better that you're looking for your order to fill at. So, right now Bitcoin
is trading at 76,300 and some change, but let's say you were looking to pay $75,000 or less to purchase the Bitcoin. You could come in here and make this a limit price of 75,000,
and then you can see on the screen to the left where it now added that here showing us on the chart where that limit price would be. Now, right now we're set to 0.1 units or 1/10 of a Bitcoin, and that sounds pretty good. And then here
where it says exits, you can actually set a take profit and stop loss order, which is going to be part of your risk management strategy. Now, I'm going to I'm not going to worry about that just yet, but right now we have a limit order
to buy at 75,000, and if I click on this, it's going to actually submit that order, so I'll go ahead and do that now. And it says limit order placed on Bitcoin buy one or sorry, buy 0.1 at 75,000.
Now, if I close this box, we now have the option to look at our orders, and we can see our order listed here, and it's a buy, a limit order at 75,000, but it hasn't filled, and that's because nobody is willing to sell me Bitcoin for 75,000
or less, and that's because of the market price of 76,300. So, the price would have to continue dropping here and come down to this level in order for that order to fill. So, there's no guarantee that this order
what we're going to do is actually cancel this order and then place a market order that way we can make sure it actually goes through. So, the way you would cancel this is you can either click on the X here. You can also click
just change your limit price if you want. But, we're just going to cancel it here or you can click on the X up here and it will also cancel your order. So, I'm going to click on cancel order and then just like that the limit order has
been canceled and we're going to switch this now over to a market order just to show you what that looks like when this goes through immediately. So, this is the same exact amount .1 Bitcoin. It's going to be about 7638 and some change
or plus or minus a few dollars and we're going to add our take profit and stop loss afterwards. So, I'm just going to click on the buy button and it's going to go through immediately. So, if I click on that, we can now see the order
was sent and I'll click on the X here and now we have a position of one and this is actually showing us our position here in Bitcoin. Now, there's a couple things I want to talk to you about now in this section because at this point we
now have an unrealized P&L or profit and loss and this is showing you the potential profit or loss on this portfolio on a position that we haven't sold yet or positions that we haven't sold yet. That's why it's jumping around
all over and then when I actually sell, it's going to show the realized P&L or how much we've actually made or lost from recognized um profits or losses from trades that are actually filled and this is how you can track whether or not
you are making or losing money with your paper trading account. And we can see it's moving all over the place the unrealized P&L and you can also track this position by position by scrolling over here, and we can see our unrealized
P&L here as a dollar value and represented here as a percentage value. dropping, so I we're probably going to lose money on this trade, but we're just doing this here for demo purposes. And this is the beauty of the paper trading
account is none of this is actual losses. So, let's say you were bullish here on Bitcoin and you wanted to sell or take profit when Bitcoin reached the 9-day simple moving average again and crossed above that line. Well, at that
that level. And the way you would do where it says TP, and then you would click on this and drag it up, and that would create a sell order for you. So, if I click on this and drag it up, it's
now going to show a dollar value. And this is our profit potential if it actually reaches this price. We're going to drag it up to roughly the 9-day SMA, and that means we could potentially make about $313.60.
As soon as I deselect, it offers the ability to confirm the order here on the right. And this is going to be a take profit at 79,500, meaning it would automatically sell if we reach that price. So, I'm going to go
ahead and click on the confirm button, and just like that it has submitted that order. So, we now have a take profit in place. And how about a stop loss now, which is exactly what the name suggests. It's going to be something that stops
larger potential losses by automatically selling. So, let's say for example you want to have a stop loss order and you want it to be the bottom of these two candles here, which is around 737. You would click here on SL. You would
comfortable with, and it looks like be, and we could potentially lose 258.97. if that looks good, I'm going to click here on confirm. And now all of that
information has been added to our screen. We can see our profit potential, our loss potential, our real-time price change here. So, we have lost about $11, and we can see the prices that we've set here over on the right. So, yes, it does
you really break it down element by element, it's really not that confusing, and you already understand the majority of what we're looking at here on this this, you can just click and drag it
around and drop your stop loss order, or move it up, for example. You just have to confirm it if you want to actually make that change over here. And so, chart is you can just drag your lines up and down, and it's really, really
convenient. But, what we're going to do now is just close out this order and that here, there's multiple different ways, but one of the simplest is coming down here and clicking on the X where it says close, and you can either do a
everything, or if you just want to sell everything, you'd click here on close position, and then just like that, everything is deleted from the screen, our take profit, our stop loss, and now we have sold this with a market order,
and we have a realized P&L of balance has has dropped from 100,000 to 99,983.86
Now, a few things I want to show you down here that can be useful. If you take a look at your order history, this is going to show you the orders that you if you want to keep track of things there. You can also look at your balance
history, and this can be really helpful just to understand, okay, what happened with my balance? We started at 100,000, we came over to this number, we lost this amount of money, and you can keep track of how your balance is changing
or losing money with these trades that you are placing. So guys, that's the TradingView. The last thing I want to cover are where you might want to go from here and some common beginner mistakes to avoid. Starting off with
where to go from here, I would recommend setting up a paper trading account with a realistic amount of money, say $10,000 for example. And then from there, I would recommend placing a total of 10 trades, that way you can familiarize
yourself with the platform. Don't worry about trying to make money early on or deploying any specific strategies. It's all about familiarizing yourself with the workstation. After that, you might decide to focus on one particular
technical indicator or trading strategy, but what you want to avoid here is just trying to do too much too fast. And as far as what to avoid, let me go ahead and give you a rundown. The first thing I would avoid here at all costs is
playing around in the paper trading simulator. Yes, it might be fun to deploy 10 to one leverage with a $1 million paper trading account, but let's good habits whatsoever. Trading with a realistic sum of money and having a
proper risk management strategy is what you want to do here, especially if you're looking to simulate a real trading environment and learn the good habits. Second of all, do not risk your entire paper trading account value on a
single trade. You would never do this in the real world, so don't do it in a paper trading account, and you should apply that line of thinking to anything that you're doing within a paper trading environment. Because again, it's all
about the habits here and you want to be forming good habits and not bad habits. And finally, I would caution you against diving into real trading, even if you have success with a paper trading account. Because here's the thing, while
paper trading can be a really good practice environment, it's missing one very crucial thing, and that is the emotions. As soon as you start trading with real money, it's going to feel different. And those feelings are what
is going to affect your overall decision-making. A lot of people will trading, but then when they switch over to trading real money, it's a completely different experience because of those emotions that come into the equation.
trading can help you to build discipline and skill, but it's always going to feel If you made it to the end of the video subscribe if you haven't already. And if you have any questions, leave them down
below and I'll do my best to answer each one. You can click below to watch this next video I think you might enjoy on options trading for beginners, and I'll options trading for beginners, and I'll see you there.