Overcharts comes with a powerful trading simulator. Using the simulator you can learn to trade through Overcharts WITHOUT ANY RISK. Indeed, within the simulator, trading is LOCALLY SIMULATED by Overcharts. No orders placed through the simulator are sent to your broker/data-feed.
The simulator is nothing more than a SIMULATOR workspace. This means that:
- There are no limits to the number of simulators you can create and use simultaneously
- There is NO difference in usage between a simulator and a REGULAR workspace. In other words, you DO NOT have to learn anything new to use a simulator versus a REGULAR workspace and vice versa.
If you have a demo/real account + data-feed with a broker or a Prop-Trading (like Earn2Trade, APEX etc.), to trade through your account you MUST use a REGULAR workspace and NOT a SIMULATOR workspace. If you use a SIMULATOR workspace, trading is simulated locally by Overcharts and no orders will be sent to your broker!
To use the simulator you must:
- Connect to a data feed. Trading is simulated locally, but historical and real-time data is taken from your data-feed. You can choose any data-feed among those supported by Overcharts (which provide historical and real-time data). You can also use ‘data only‘ data-feeds. Since trading is simulated by Overcharts, you do not need to open an account (demo or real) + data-feed with a broker.
- Have set up at least one Simulation Account. There are already some pre-set simulation accounts available in Overcharts. You can modify their configuration or create others according to your needs.
- Create a SIMULATOR workspace.
Create a Simulator #
A simulator is a SIMULATOR workspace, therefore to create a simulator you just need to create a SIMULATOR workspace.
To create a SIMULATOR workspace:
- refer to this documentation
- or in Overcharts main window > Charts & Trading Tab > press NEW SIMULATOR button
The workspace type is shown in the workspace list:
![](https://www.overcharts.com/en/helpcenter/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/workspaces-type1.png)
If the workspace is a SIMULATOR workspace, ‘simulator‘ label is displayed in the upper right of the workspace window:
![](https://www.overcharts.com/en/helpcenter/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/workspaces-type2.png)
Reset a Simulation Account #
You can reset a simulation account at any time by accessing the Simulation Accounts window. The reset deletes all orders and positions from the account and restores the balance to an initial state.
Warnings #
- Simulation is still a simulation and however accurate it may be it will NEVER simulate reality 100%. Some situations (order execution, position management, etc.) that do not occur in the simulation may instead occur in reality and vice versa.
- Before trading in real mode, in addition to using the Overcharts simulator, we reccomend you use a demo account with a broker based on the same data-feed you will use in real trading. Each data-feed has its own way of working and its own settings. Overcharts internal simulation is general. For this reason it may differ from the single data-feed.
- If you have a demo/real account + data-feed with a broker or a Prop-Trading (like Earn2Trade, APEX etc.), to trade through your account you MUST use a REGULAR workspace and NOT a SIMULATOR workspace. If you use a SIMULATOR workspace, trading is simulated locally by Overcharts and no orders will be sent to your broker!
- To use the simulator you MUST have a demo/real or ‘data only’ data-feed to use as a data provider.
- In simulation, orders and positions are per instrument! In other words, if in the same connection you have 2 instruments with the same symbol, each instrument will have its own orders and positions even if the symbol is the same. This does NOT happen in demo or real trading using a broker/data-feed account where multiple instruments with the same symbol belonging to the same connection all refer to a single instrument on broker/data-feed side.