(live) 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


  A paper fill is a bookkeeping entry, not a market event. Treat the journal it
  produces as a test of your alert plumbing and your own decision speed, not as
  evidence a strategy makes money.


- **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:

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **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](/pricing).
- You save Dhan or Zerodha credentials in Settings. They are envelope-encrypted before they reach the database. Read the [Dhan](/brokers/dhan) and [Zerodha Kite Connect](/brokers/zerodha) 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](/learn/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](/connectors/telegram), paste your webhook into a TradingView alert, and your first card fills on paper. Live brokers follow when the adapter ships.