Paper trading to real money: memecoins, Practice to Live¶

Go from paper trading memecoins to real money without blowing up: what to practice, what to measure, when you are ready and how to start Live small.

Paper is where you find out your plan is bad for free. That is all it is for.

Practice results do not carry over. A good paper month is a reason to try small, not a forecast. The market is real in Practice.

Your fills, your nerves and your costs are not. How to start is on the paper trading page, and the switch itself is in Practice and Live. This guide is the path between them.

Why practice memecoin trading does not carry over¶

Same market data, different fills:

	Practice	Live
Your own trades	The live quote's price and the pool's fee, plus the priority fee. No quote: 0.5%, 0.0002 SOL and price impact from pool depth	A real swap: pool fee, network fee, and our 1% each way
Getting filled	Booked at once	Has to land. It can fail, or fill worse, inside Max price move
Copy buys	Flat 0.5% plus 0.0002 SOL and price impact, 2 slots after their buy	Pool fee (about 1.25% on pump.fun), your Jito tip and our 0.2%, each way
Copy sells	A live quote's pool fee when there is one. No tip	Same as the buy
Which buys get copied	pump.fun and PumpSwap	The pump.fun curve only
Exits on your own trades, no tab open	They sell	They wait, unless you allow them
Your own size	Never touches the pool	Moves the pool, and everyone sees it

Practice also books a copy's buy when a real one would land, and refuses it if the price ran past your slippage. That part is fair. Almost everything else leans its way.

What to do in Practice¶

Write the plan down. What you buy, at what size, and how you get out. Use your first exit plan if you have none.
Trade the size you will trade. You start with 1,000 USD of play money. If you will fund a fraction of that, trade a fraction of that. Paper sizes teach paper habits.
Set exits before the buy. No position should read "No exits. Only you sell this."
Keep one set of rules. Change one thing, then count again from zero. Reset in Account archives your practice trades and starts over.
Sit through a bad run. The losing week is the lesson. Do not reset to make it go away.

Copying instead of clicking? Your first copy trade has its own steps.

What to measure in paper trading¶

Open Portfolio in Practice and open Stats:

Made on sold tokens, not On tokens you hold. Banked, not hoped.
Win rate beside Average win and Average loss. A high win rate with a big Average loss is a slow way to lose.
Biggest drop: the deepest fall of your sold-trade P&L from its high.
Fees paid. Then find your worst day on the P&L calendar.

Then take the Live costs off yourself, per closed trade:

Your own trades: take off at least 2 points, our 1% each way.
Copies at 0.1 SOL: take off about 3 points. Live costs about 5% of each trade there and Practice about 2%. The gap shrinks as size grows, because the tip is flat.

That is the known gap. Worse fills come on top, and nobody can tell you the size of that in advance.

How you know you are ready for real money¶

Top traders in Copy Trade will not rate a trader under 30 trades across 15 tokens. Hold yourself to the same bar.

You are ready to try small when all of these are true:

At least 30 closed trades across at least 15 tokens, on one set of rules.
Still green after you take the Live costs off.
No single trade makes up the whole result.
Your worst day on the calendar is a loss you could pay in real SOL and keep to the plan.
You did not skip your own rules to get there.

You are not ready if you reset after a bad run, if your exits were switched off for the winners, or if you want Live to win back something.

Passing this says you were disciplined on paper. It does not say you will make money. Nothing on this page can catch the part that only shows up with real SOL on the line: you, at 3am, watching a stop get hit.

How to start Live small¶

Add only what you can lose. See Funding your wallet. Your Main wallet is your own and you can export its key. Live needs a small minimum balance, and the switch tells you if you are short.
Switch. Press the SOL icon and read Switch to Live?. It shows your wallet, balance and fee. Copies stay in Practice unless you press Choose. Leave them there for now.
Set your smallest size. Change your Buy presets in Trade settings. 0.05 SOL to 0.1 SOL is a starting point. Do not go much lower: the first buy of a token holds about 0.002 SOL as a deposit until you sell to zero, and that is a big share of a tiny trade.
Leave the defaults. Max price move at 10% and Speed off. Raise them only once a trade fails for a reason you understand. What each setting does: Settings explained.
Sort the closed tab. Turn on Keep exits running when I close the app, or stay at the screen. The exit guide says what it covers.
Count again from zero. Practice and Live P&L never mix, so Portfolio shows Live on its own. Set your first Live trades against your Practice numbers. A gap wider than your costs is your real fill quality.
Size up slowly. Another 30 closed trades in Live, then one step up. A bad week means a step down.

One copy at a time comes after that, from the Copy wallet, once your own trades hold up.

Going back is one press and asks nothing. Positions you hold in Live stay in your wallet, and you see them again when you switch back.

Before you send it¶

Read the fills table again. Nearly every gap runs against you.
Keep the same plan in Practice and Live, or the comparison means nothing.
Measure banked P&L after costs, not the balance.
Start at a size that hurts a little and ruins nothing.
Go back to Practice whenever the plan changes. It is free, and that is the point.
Nothing here is advice, and no practice result promises a Live one.