A little while ago, I built a small paper trading page for myself. The goal, like I imagine it must be for many others, was to try out trading on my own, in a safe environment, to learn about the analytical part of trading without having to lose money.
I learned more important things.
I don't have the time to trade. Active trading takes active investment, and active time that I unfortunately do not have. To really appreciate and react to market news, you need to formulate a thesis that can be verified and responded to in real time. I have time to think, and write, but only because I prioritize those things for their compounding effects. Active trading is far more incremental.
Paper trading is a fundamentally different exercise than trading with real money.
Paper trading and trading with money are similar in the way that pickleball and ping pong are. They both use racquets. The people who don't play either think its mostly the same. Anyone who does at least one, if not both, can tell you why they're night and day.
Paper trading is fundamentally about analysis. You can be strategic and practice towards reaching some goal, but it misses a more fundamental piece that can't be captured. Your emotional state. It's easy to look at a series of trades doing poorly, and exit when it drops below a certain threshold. It's something entirely different when you lose your own money.
Everyone has a different emotional and rational relationship with money. The fact that my initial idea was to give myself a simulated environment to try trading out in is indicative of the fact that I'm quite averse to losing my own. The point though, is that even if I end up making a ton of money on paper, that gives me very little signal about how I'll perform when it's my own.
As humans, we constantly underestimate the role that our emotions play in our decision making process; whether or not we want them to. I wonder too, if this also causes us to underestimate the role that emotion plays in general intelligence, even if its non human.