Your paper account: cash, positions and profit

Every trade on Trenches uses paper cash: practice money at real market prices. This guide shows what your account is worth, and how much of that you earned by trading. After reading it, you can tell a deposit from a gain, close any position, and read your trades and fees.

Where your paper cash comes from

A free account starts with $10,000 of paper cash. Paper cash cannot be withdrawn or exchanged.

More arrives as you use the app: lesson cash the first time you finish a level, $5 for each new word you learn, and rewards such as the day's reward and quest chests. Each one is a deposit, paper cash the app adds and never real money you put in. Your cash and your total deposited rise by the same amount, and your starting $10,000 counts as deposited too.

Your paper equity is what the account is worth now: your cash plus every open position (what you still hold from a trade) at its latest price.

Easy to mix up: Paper cash and Paper equity. A buy moves dollars from cash into a position, so cash drops while equity barely moves: only costs such as the fee come off.

All time profit is your equity minus every dollar deposited. So a deposit never counts as profit, while a coin you hold that goes up does, even before you sell.

Say you start with $10,000 and learn four new words. That pays $20 as a deposit: equity and deposits both rise to $10,020, and All time profit stays at $0.

Then you buy $1,000 of a coin. After its fee the coins are worth a little under $1,000, until the price rises and they are worth $1,050. Equity is now $10,070 and deposits are still $10,020, so All time profit reads $50.

The lesson Realized and unrealized in one position puts it in one line: adding cash is never a profit or a loss.

The lessons named on this page sit in sections 2 and 6 of the Crypto course and in the Memecoin starter. Each opens when you reach it in order, or sooner if you pass a mastery test on the course map.

Where to see your account on a computer

Click Hub in the sidebar. The strip across its top shows Paper equity, All time profit and In positions: what you hold, plus cash set aside for orders that have not filled yet.

For the whole account, click Profile in the sidebar. Its Portfolio tab opens first:

1. The value line: your account's worth over 24H, 7D, 30D or ALL. A deposit moves the line, but the change above it leaves deposits out.
2. The Paper cash row, with a Trade button.
3. Your book, a summary card marked Paper money: In positions, then Total P&L (profit and loss), counted like All time profit. Fees paid and Funding received or Funding paid show once you have any. Funding is a regular payment between traders on a perp, a contract that follows a price and can be bigger than the cash behind it.
4. By market: how your equity splits across Memecoin, Crypto (major coins, such as Bitcoin), Perp, Stock, Option, Forex, Orders and Cash.

The lesson Four lines on one statement shows why cash and positions sit on separate lines.

How do you close a position?

On a computer, the Your positions card under Your book lists every open position. On a phone, see the phone section below.

1. Keep Open picked (Closed lists trades you have finished). Coins worth under $1 are dust, hidden until you switch on Show dust.
2. Click a row for its details: Size, Entry (your average price per unit), Mark (the latest price used to value it) and Opened. A leveraged trade, one bigger than the cash behind it, also shows Liq. price: where it closes and that cash, its margin, is gone.
3. Under Close, pick 25%, 50% or 100%. The button reads Close position, or Close 25% or Close 50%.
4. Click it once and it turns to Confirm, or Confirm 25% for a part. Click again to close.

A forex position, one currency traded against another, closes whole, and an option, a contract on a stock, closes in whole contracts. A stock you close while its market is shut reads Sell queued and sells when the market opens.

Perp, forex and stock positions also hold TP / SL (take profit and stop loss): prices where the position closes on its own, to lock in a gain or cap a loss. Type one or both, then Save.

A new memecoin starts on a bonding curve, the launch rule that prices it as people buy. Once it leaves the curve, it gets Protect: the same two exits, set in market cap (price times supply). Its take profit needs Elite, the paid membership, and options and major coins have neither.

During a battle, a timed head to head paper match, coin and perp trades use the battle's own paper balance, so those rows show no Close until it ends.

Closed lists your round trips: each a trade from open to close. A row shows its realized result, the profit or loss already in your cash, then its return on what went in, such as +$45.00 and 4.50% on $1,000.00.

The lesson What a position cost shows why a cost includes the fee. The lesson Value on screen versus cash from a sale shows why a sale returns less than the value on screen: it pays the fee and can move the price.

Your trades and fees

On a computer, the Trades card on Portfolio lists every trade, newest first, with All trades, Buys and Sells filters and Show more. Its columns are Token, Action, Amount, Price and Time.

• A coin, stock, option or forex trade reads Buy or Sell.
• A perp reads Open long (it gains if the price rises) or Open short (it gains if the price falls). The amount is its full size in dollars. Under it sit the margin and the leverage, size divided by margin: a $200 position on $100 of margin is 2x.
• A perp ends as Close long or Close short, or as Liquidated long or Liquidated short if it hit its Liq. price.
• A close shows its realized result under the amount. A perp also shows its fee under the price. For a coin, the Price shown already includes the fee.

Deposits never show here: lesson cash, rewards and funding are not trades.

Under the list sits the paper fees line:

• Memecoins pay 1% of each buy and each sale, and major coins 0.25%.
• Perps pay 0.05% of notional, the full position size, at the open and again at the close.
• Stocks and options trade free.
• Forex pays its spread, the gap between the buy and sell price, inside the price you get.

The lesson Both ends of one completed round trip shows how a result already holds both fees.

Your account on a phone

1. On the Trade tab, the top row shows your balance and today's change, with an eye that hides it.
2. Tap the balance, or the pie at the start of the market tabs, for your portfolio: the value line, then Today, Realized (closed trades) and Open P&L (open positions). Below sit Positions, Orders and History, which lists your trades without deposits.
3. On the Hub, Paper portfolio shows your balance and today's move. Under Practice, Journal (Trades & notes) opens your trading record.
4. On the You tab, the value line shows your balance by day, week, month or all time. Tap an open position, then Sell on a coin or Trade on anything else, to close it from its own page.

Where else your trades count

Ranks, the leaderboards, has a Profits board. Pick 1D, 1W or 1M (a day, a week, a month), then Total, Realized (closed trades) or Unrealized (still open). On a phone, Total reads Profit. Deposits stay out here too.

Your weekly league, a group of up to 30 players, ranks you by points. Each close scores by its result, never its size: 8 points in profit, minus 3 at a loss and minus 10 for a liquidation. Battles, Ranks and the weekly leagues has more.

Trading IQ, the skill score on your profile, also reads your closed paper trades, weighing each result against the loss you planned at your stop. Risking 2% of your account or less helps. Trades too big for your account, liquidations and holding a losing trade past its stop pull it down, and a big profit barely moves it. Trading IQ: what it measures and how it moves explains the rest.