Is Rithmic Paper Trading Environment Realistic?

Are the fills received from Rithmic’s paper trading environment “realistic”? Especially concerning limit orders placed by the user. Does the paper trading environment employ a “pessimistic fill”? i.e. you are filled when the whole price queue is depleted. Or we can expect something better based on queue position of the user order when it was recieved?

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Thank you for your question. We have requested some feedback from Rithmic and soon as they provide it we would be able to provide you with answers about the trading queue.

We will answer it in lieu of our experience and knowledge. First, demo/simulated accounts are on their own servers, and they may not have all the resources that production (live) servers have in terms of speed, execution, and robustness.
In our opinion, you will get better fills and execution on a production server.

Our experience with the RIthmic feed in terms of latency has been good. First, it delivers very accurately (nonfiltered) the tick data from the exchanges. Second, it has probably one of the lowest low latency executions that we have seen across a myriad of futures trading APIs.

Having said all that, the speed of execution will also rely upon your own internet connectivity, the number of trading software you run, the number of feeds you are running, and the compatibility of your software to the futures trading API.

Please let us know if you have additional questions.

Thank you,
Matt Z
Optimus Futures

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As you know, Rithmic’s Paper Trading system has an exchange simulator that fills orders based upon live market data. Our filling algorithm also takes into account when your order was received by the simulator, Rithmic’s estimated place of the order in the order queue and the order’s attributes (price, size, buy/sell, etc.). We report a fill when the market trades through your price and when the orders ahead of you in the queue, based upon our estimate of your position in the queue and market activity, are depleted and there is quantity or opposite side order activity at your price level. This is not pessimistic. It is somewhat realistic.

To note: our filling algorithmic treats each account separately which means that orders from one account in our paper trading system do not affect orders of any other account in our paper trading system. In the live market, orders from all accounts and users do affect each other’s orders.

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