How to Paper Trade on Webull for Beginners in 2026 (Zero Risk)

[00:01] trading simulators out there and I'm going to be showing you exactly how to use it from placing a trade to seeing if you're making money or not and more. I I'm not a financial advisor and this isn't personalized financial advice.

[00:16] With that said guys, let's dive into my full Webull paper trading tutorial for beginners now and if you enjoy content like this, drop a like and subscribe. Okay guys, so the first step here is going to be opening up a Webull account

[00:28] to use their paper trading simulator and you don't actually have to fund this account in order to use their trading simulator. Now, Webull is a partner of my channel so they do offer my audience a free bonus when you sign up and that's

[00:40] typically a free stock promotion or a deposit bonus. Be sure to visit ryanoscribner.com/webull or click the top link in the description below to see their current free bonus offer. I will also include my full

[00:54] corner if you're looking for a step-by-step guide on how to open a new account. So for starters guys, how do you locate the paper trading feature? button in the bottom right and then you're going to scroll down and click on

[01:09] this more button and then on this screen here under trading, you'll see the option here for paper trade. So go ahead and select that and this is going to bring you to your paper trading account. Now, I already have one established from

[01:22] my previous tutorial and the cool thing is we're going to be able to analyze this and see if we're making money or not that way you can do the same thing with your paper trading portfolio. Now, the first thing I want to show you

[01:34] notice it says stocks and options. That's what we have selected. But if you click here on futures, you actually have a separate paper trading portfolio for futures trading. So if you wanted to practice with both of these, you could

[01:48] toggle between those two portfolios. But for this video, we're just going to focus on the stocks and options side of the equation and right now we're looking at a net account value of 568 and some change. Now, this is a paper trading

[02:01] account I started with $500, but if you want to make an adjustment here to the amount that you're starting with or possibly reset your account, you would click on this pencil and paper icon. And by default, it's going to be a $1

[02:15] million paper trading account, but for a lot of people, that's just not realistic. So, that's why I started out my account with just $500. So, you might want to start off by just changing this amount of money or maybe you practice

[02:29] and want to start over and this is how you can reset that account. But for now, is because we're actually going to analyze the performance of this portfolio. So, let's go ahead and place a paper trade now. What you're going to

[02:42] here at the bottom right. And to the left of that, we can see my buying power, which is the amount of money I have to invest, currently $65. trade button now and then we're going to type in the symbol. So, for this case,

[02:57] we're going to buy some shares of Ford stock for this demo and the symbol there is F. And guys, this is not a buy or sell recommendation. This is just for demo purposes. And at the very top, we can see Ford stock on the New York Stock

[03:10] Exchange. So, we're going to go ahead and select that. And the current share and select that. And the current share price is $15.16. Now, by default, what we're looking at here is a candlestick chart and I do

[03:22] have some technical indicators enabled here, the moving averages. So, it might look a little bit confusing here, but we can actually change this chart pretty easily. If you click on the candlestick icon here, we can actually change this

[03:34] over to a basic line chart and it's just showing us the 24-hour chart by default, different spans of time if we want to. And we can also turn off these technical indicators by just clicking up here and clicking on this X and now we don't have

[03:49] those moving averages. So, now we just have a basic line chart, and if you wanted to add some technical indicators, you can click on the four circles here at the right, and then you can choose indicators, you can choose drawing

[04:01] tools, chart layers, things like that. So, if we select indicators and then MA for moving averages, well, now those have been added back to our chart. So, that's what Webull is really known for is this advanced charting, technical

[04:14] indicators, and all sorts of things like that built into one very easy-to-use a drop-down where you can view key statistics like the dividend yield. For example, this pays a .6% or I'm sorry, a dividend yield of 3.97%.

[04:30] The dollar value is actually 60 cents. So, you can get details like that here under key statistics, but we're just going to close that for now. And then if you're looking to trade options, you would click here to view the options

[04:43] chain, and right now it's just looking at call options. If you wanted to look at put options, you can choose that here, or you can look at both at the same time. So, that's how you would um view the options available. You would

[04:55] you're looking to actually place a trade. So, if you're looking to practice options trading, this can be a great place to do that as well. To the right, we can see company news, and then you can get details about anything that's

[05:08] going on in the news for the company. There's going to be details here about analyst ratings, uh price targets, and things like that, and you can also view key company financials here like their earnings reports, um financial

[05:21] statements, and details like that. And there's also a SE tracker, which is ownership. And there are additional subscription, but to be honest, even with this basic free subscription,

[05:34] there's a ton of very useful data available. But for now, we're just going click on the paper trade button at the bottom, and this is going to bring us to the order ticket window. So, by default, we have a limit order, and we have a buy

[05:48] selected. And with a limit order, this means we can specify the exact price or better that we're looking to buy or sell for. In this case, it's a buy, but we are actually going to change this to a market order just to prioritize the

[06:01] order actually going through. But, if you're actually placing trades and trying to ensure, you know, very specific order execution, you would case, we're just going to do a market order, and the shares are about $15

[06:15] each. And as mentioned, and it shows right here, my buying power is $65. So, we're going to buy a quantity of four, and that's going to be a little bit over $60, uh $60.40 based on the current quote. And that is

[06:29] moving around here based on the actual trading happening at the exchange. So, it shows that this is actually real-time market data. And when we're ready, we can click here on the paper trade button. And it says insufficient funds

[06:42] order failure. It might just be that we have to maybe only buy three shares. Uh so, let's try purchasing three and clicking on paper trade. depending on how much money you have, it might not let you use all of that money,

[06:56] or you might just have to split it up into two orders. But, in this case, we just bought three shares of Ford at an average price of 15.12. And then if we click on the back button a few times and navigate to the main

[07:09] paper trading portfolio screen, if we scroll down, it's going to be listed here under my positions. So, now let's talk about this portfolio screen and how to tell whether or not you're making money or losing money on these

[07:22] individual investments and across the whole portfolio. Looking at this on a to the top here, we can see a net account value of 569 and some change. Now, I know that I started off with $500, so I can see that I've made money,

[07:37] didn't realize how much you started the portfolio with? Well, below that we can see open P&L, which is your open profit and loss, and that's currently a dollar value of 69.60 and it changes around as the portfolio

[07:52] changes or a percentage value of about 14.5% and you can also look at the line chart here to see how this portfolio has performed over time. So, for example, when I first invested in just some

[08:04] Google with this portfolio, it was worth $500. We can see it dipped slightly and actually dropped quite a bit to about 458, somewhere around there. So, I actually lost some money initially, but then it

[08:19] went up from there and reached a high over here of somewhere around $590 for the whole portfolio and now we've settled around 570 at this point in time. And then below that we can actually see this button here that says

[08:33] performance and this is going to show you more details about the overall profit and loss, what has your annual return been and different things like that. You can scroll down to get more details and you can also look at this on

[08:46] an individual stock level and click into each one of these for more detail. But for me personally, this isn't my favorite way to track gains or losses because it's a little bit confusing and quite a bit of information. So, the way

[08:58] I like to track this on an individual level is scrolling down here and looking at my positions because it's going to show you position by position what your profit or loss has been and this is unrealized because we haven't sold yet.

[09:11] If you actually sold these, then you would have a realized profit or loss. But just looking here at Google, it's going to first show us here the MKT value {slash} quantity, that's the market value. So, currently about 382

[09:24] and we own one share. To the right of that it shows the open P&L in terms of both a dollar value and a percentage. So, currently I'm up 22.32% So, currently I'm up 22.32% on my one share of Google or Alphabet.

[09:38] see the last price, which is the same as the current market value. And below that is my average price. So, I paid $312.78 for one share of Alphabet, and it's now worth about $382, hence why I am up. And

[09:54] here at one share of Intel, which was bought earlier today, and the three shares of Ford, and we can see I'm down slightly on the Intel. Now, I'm down slightly on the Ford, and we can see the average price paid, and then the closing

[10:09] price, or the current price, rather. When the market's actually closed, you'd there. But that's how you can track if you're making or losing money here on an individual investment basis. But there

[10:22] guide on paper trading for beginners using WeBull. As I'm sure you can see, this is a lot easier than it would be to track trades on physical paper, and it's one of the many reasons why investing is just so much easier today than it has

[10:36] been in years past. If you have any questions, leave me a comment down don't forget to visit ryanoscribner.com/webull, or click the top link down below to check out their current free bonus offer

[10:50] for my audience. If you want to learn more about paper trading, check out my next video here on the TradingView paper trading platform. This is more of an advanced trading workstation for day trading and active trading strategies.

[11:04] So, be sure to check that out, and I will see you there.