Practice tools
Practise first. Pay later.
Two tools are all a new trader needs — FX Replay to take real trades on past market data, and TradingView to learn the charts. Both are free to start, and together they let you get a hundred trades in before you risk a single dollar.
- 2
- Tools to start with
- $0
- To begin tonight
- 100
- Trades before you pay
How to practise
The order that actually works
Buying software does not make you profitable. Doing these four things in this order is what separates the traders who pass from the ones who keep paying evaluation fees.
Pick one market
MNQ or MES. One market, one session. Learning two at once means you learn neither, and it doubles the ways you can be surprised.
Replay it in FX Replay
Trade past days candle by candle with no money at risk. This is where the repetitions come from — a weekend here beats months of waiting for setups live.
Chart and paper trade it
TradingView for your charts, and its free paper trading account to trade the same setup forward on live prices while you keep replaying.
Count before you pay
100 trades minimum. Know your win rate and your average win versus average loss. Only then does an evaluation fee make sense.
Start here
The two you actually need
These are the practice tools. Both have a free plan, so there is nothing stopping you starting tonight.
FX Replay
Practise on real market data, without risking a cent
This is where you actually learn to trade. FX Replay plays past market days back to you candle by candle, so you can take real trades on real price action with no money at risk. A beginner can get more practice in one weekend here than in six months of waiting for setups to appear live — and it costs nothing to start.
- Practise with zero money at risk — it's a simulator, not a broker
- Replay years of past data across futures, indices and forex
- Get hundreds of repetitions in a weekend instead of waiting months
- Keeps your results, so you can see whether your setup actually works
How to practise with it
- 1Pick ONE market and stay on it — MNQ or MES is plenty to learn on.
- 2Replay one past day at a time and take only your setup, nothing else.
- 3Do 50 trades before you judge anything. Ten trades tells you nothing.
- 4Read your win rate and average win vs average loss. That's your edge, in numbers.
TradingView
Free charts to learn on — with paper trading built in
Where you'll read the market. The free plan is genuinely enough for a new trader, and it has a built-in paper trading account — fake money on live prices — so you can practise forward in real time as well as backwards in replay. Most prop firms either connect to it directly or accept it as your analysis screen.
- Paper trading built in — practise on live prices with fake money
- Free plan is genuinely enough while you're learning
- Clean layouts you save once per market and reuse every session
- Alerts watch the level for you, so you stop trading out of boredom
How to practise with it
- 1Open a paper trading account — it's free and takes about a minute.
- 2Build ONE clean chart. No more than two indicators while you're learning.
- 3Set an alert at your level instead of staring at the screen all day.
- 4Trade it forward in paper for two weeks alongside your replay practice.
Practice the other half too
Practise your sizing,
not just your entries.
New traders practise finding trades and skip practising how big to make them. Then the first live account dies on one oversized position. Use the same numbers in replay that you will use on a funded account.
0.5–1%
Risk per trade
3 losses
Daily stop
40+
Trades in your buffer
1
Markets at once
Later — not now
For when you have an account to protect
You do not need any of these to practise, and buying them early is the most common way new traders waste money. Come back when you have hit the specific problem each one solves.
NinjaTrader
Execution
Supported by nearly every futures prop firm on our list, and free to use for charting and simulated trading — which covers the whole evaluation stage. Strong order-entry tools, a mature ecosystem of add-ons, and the ATM strategies that make a hard daily stop easy to enforce.
Best for
Running your evaluation on the platform firms expect
Tradovate
Execution
A cloud futures platform that runs in the browser and on mobile, with no desktop install and no per-machine licence. Widely supported by prop firms, and the easiest way to check a position from a phone without leaving a trade unmanaged.
Best for
Trading from any machine without an install
Bookmap
Order flow
A heatmap of the order book that shows where size is actually resting. It will not hand you a strategy, but if you trade ES or NQ around the open it explains why price keeps rejecting a level that looks like nothing on a candle chart.
Best for
Intraday traders who scalp levels on ES and NQ
Quantower
Execution
A multi-connection trading platform with a strong DOM and built-in volume analysis. Useful if you hold accounts at more than one prop firm and would rather not relearn a new order ticket every time you switch.
Best for
Traders running accounts at several firms at once
Tradezella
Journaling
Automatic trade journaling with the analytics that matter for an evaluation — win rate by session, by setup and by day of week. Most traders discover one specific hour or one revenge-trade pattern is responsible for the whole drawdown.
Best for
Finding the one habit that keeps failing your evaluation
Sierra Chart
Charting
No design awards, but it is the most stable and lowest-latency charting package in futures, and it is cheap. If you have outgrown a pretty platform and want something that never drops a tick during the New York open, this is the usual endpoint.
Best for
Experienced traders who want speed over looks
FAQ
Before you
spend anything.
Not sure where to start? Email our team and we’ll tell you honestly what you need yet — and what you don’t.
FX Replay. Charts make more sense once you have taken trades on them, and replay is the only way to take a lot of trades quickly without risking money. Add TradingView alongside it in week one for your charting and paper trading.
Until you have at least 100 replay trades on one setup and you know your win rate and your average win versus average loss. For most people that is a few weeks. An evaluation fee spent before that is a donation.
No. FX Replay and TradingView both have a free plan and you can start tonight without spending anything. You upgrade later if you hit a limit that is actually slowing you down — not before.
It won't teach you how it feels to lose real money — nothing except losing real money does that. What it does teach is whether your setup has an edge at all, and that is the part that decides whether you pass. Learn the edge in practice, learn the emotions on a small live account.
We earn an affiliate commission on some of these links, at no extra cost to you. We do not rank a tool higher for paying more, and we point you at the free plans even when a free signup earns us nothing.