Why most simulated trading is useless, the four rules that make it the cheapest edge available, and a graduation rule to decide when to go live.
People open a simulator with a million fake dollars, take forty trades at 100x in an afternoon, and conclude that simulators teach nothing. They are right about that afternoon. The failure is in how it was used, not in the idea. Pilots do not learn in simulators by crashing on purpose.
Match the simulated balance to the account you will actually trade, or scale every number down to it. A $5,000 trader practicing with $1,000,000 learns to tolerate losses that would end the real account in an hour.
Stops, a daily loss limit, a maximum number of trades, a journal. The purpose of paper trading is not to learn the chart; it is to find out whether you follow your own rules when it is easy. If you do not, live will be worse, and you will have found that out for free.
Delayed quotes and fake fills teach the wrong reflexes. Use a simulator with a real-time index and the same maintenance margin as a real exchange, so a 50x position dies in the sim exactly when it would die for real. A daily reset also helps: it stops you from hiding a blown account behind a lucky week. RektChat is built this way, which is why it is useful for this and useless for pretending.
Decide before you start what "ready" means. A reasonable standard: three consecutive profitable months on paper, with maximum drawdown under ten percent, following the written plan. Then real money at one tenth of the intended size, for another month, before scaling. The habits that worked on paper are size-dependent; find out gently.