Paper broker: how Sarathi simulates fills
What the paper route fills, what it skips, how the journal records a paper fill, and how to move to a live broker once an adapter ships.
Updated 30 Aug 2026
LiveLive The paper broker is the route every account starts on. It turns a confirmed order card into a fill record without touching an exchange. The decision path is unchanged: the alert lands on your webhook, the card arrives in Telegram and on the dashboard, you tap Confirm or Skip, and the signal expires on its own if you do neither. Only the thing answering the order differs.
What it simulates
| Input | Paper behaviour |
|---|---|
| Price | The card's price hint plus a fixed slippage in points. Long fills higher, short fills lower. |
| Slippage | 2 points by default. A server setting (PAPER_SLIPPAGE_PTS) changes it for the whole deployment, not per user. |
| Quantity | The card quantity times the multiplier you tapped (½, 1×, 2×), rounded to whole lots, never below one lot. |
| Status | Always filled. |
| Order id | PAPER- followed by a timestamp, so you can tell paper rows from broker rows at a glance. |
| Fees | None are applied. The fill price is the hinted price plus slippage and nothing else. |
A long BANKNIFTY card with a price hint of 57,530 fills at 57,532; a short with the same hint fills at 57,528. If the alert carried no price, the fill is still written, with an empty price and a note saying so.
The slippage is always against you. It is a fixed 2 points, not 2 ticks; the Pine header's slippage = 2 is measured in ticks, so the two numbers agree only on instruments with a 1-point tick.
What it does not simulate
- No partial fills. Live derivatives orders can fill in pieces or not at all. Paper always fills the whole quantity.
- No margin check. A 2× confirm you could not fund at your broker still fills on paper.
- No liquidity or spread. There is no order book. A far-OTM strike with a wide spread fills at the same two points as the index future.
- No market-hours or circuit check. Expiry is the only clock, and it is the card's own 15-minute window.
- No quotes. The paper route never fetches a live price. It only knows what the alert told it.
- No exchange costs. Brokerage, STT, exchange charges and GST are not deducted. The ₹350-per-order figure in Studio backtests is a Pine assumption, not something the paper broker subtracts.
Why it is the default
Every new account routes to paper, and disconnecting a live broker sends the account back to paper. Three reasons:
- Plumbing first. Many first-week problems are alert problems: a wrong ticker, a malformed payload, an alert that fires on every tick instead of on bar close. Paper surfaces those without a broker rejecting the order, or worse, accepting it.
- The tap is what is being practised. Paper measures the gap between alert and decision honestly: the journal shows when the signal arrived, when you decided, and through which surface.
- It is never metered. Paper fills, like every Confirm, Skip and expiry, cost nothing. Only order-card delivery beyond your tier's monthly allowance is charged, on every route alike.
How the journal records a paper fill
A confirmed paper order writes two things. The signal row gets the decision: confirmed, the size multiplier, the surface it came from (Telegram or web) and the time. A fill row is added with the route (paper), the order id, price, quantity, status and note.
The journal shows status, side, symbol, strategy label, quantity, entry hint, fill price, slippage, route and IST timestamp. The explicit route column keeps paper rows and future broker rows apart in one table. The Telegram card is rewritten in place to show the fill, so the chat history matches the journal.
Skips and expiries are journaled too, without a fill row. A skipped card is a decision. An expired card is the absence of one.
Moving to a live broker later
Live routing is gated by tier and by adapter status. Both gates are visible in the product.
- The Starter pack unlocks connecting a live broker; Whale adds a second one. See pricing.
- You save Dhan or Zerodha credentials in Settings. They are envelope-encrypted before they reach the database. Read the Dhan and Zerodha Kite Connect pages for what each adapter will and will not do.
- Planned Today, no adapter sends orders. If your
account is routed to Dhan or Zerodha and you tap Confirm, the order is
rejected with
Broker "<name>" is not configured, the signal is marked failed, and the rejection is journaled. A route that cannot execute fails loudly rather than falling back to paper.
Until an adapter ships, the path is the one on the pre-live checklist: run paper long enough to trust your alerts, read the journal, then size ½ on the first live day.
Get started
Sign up, link Telegram, paste your webhook into a TradingView alert, and your first card fills on paper. Live brokers follow when the adapter ships.
Questions
No. Confirm and Skip taps, expiries, fills and the journal are never metered. Only order-card delivery beyond the monthly free allowance is charged, and that applies to every route.
The price hint on the card, moved by a fixed number of points against you: added on a long, subtracted on a short. The default is 2 points. If the alert carried no price, the fill is recorded without a price.
No. Every confirmed paper order is recorded as filled for the full quantity. There is no margin check, no order book and no market-hours check.
Buy the Starter pack, then save Dhan or Zerodha credentials in Settings. Today the credentials are stored encrypted but orders are not sent; a confirm on a live route is rejected and journaled as failed until the adapter ships.
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