Student Trading Lab Account

Instructions

Our Client Portal system serves as your one-stop destination to check quotes, see account balances, P&L and key performance metrics, reporting, and more. Send email invitations to your students to open a paper trading account. Use the options in Client Portal to manage and monitor student accounts, perform account cash equity reset for your account, and more. In addition, your students can use Client Portal to reset the equity in their account. This collection of resources helps professors enhance classroom content or use our sample assignments and resources to develop student trading skills.

Professor's Trading Lab image

How Student Trading Lab Accounts Work
  • Please note that the professor's account serves for administrative and supervisory purposes. If you'd like to create a simulated trading for yourself, log in to Client Portal, send an invitation to yourself and create your sub-account.
  • You can use most order types, trade all instruments available through IBKR TWS our trading platform when you open your own sub (student) account, and experiment with almost every aspect of the platform.
  • The Paper Trader interface clearly indicates that you are working in a simulated account.
  • Trades entered into this paper trading account will not actually execute on any exchange or settle at a clearing house. However, the price of your executions will be determined by real market prices and sizes.
  • A paper trading account statement will be provided each day and is available by logging into Client Portal with your Paper Trading Account login and accessing the Reports menu.
  • All paper trading accounts start with USD 1,000,000 of paper trading Equity with Loan Value, and this equity will fluctuate as if the trades had executed in the real market.
  • You may reset the cash equity in your sub (student) account at any time in Client Portal. You can reset your paper trading cash equity to up to five times your production account value. Please note that reset requests should be entered before 16:00 ET in order to take effect for the next business day. Please close out all positions before equity reset.
Limitations

Although a Student Trading Lab Account simulates most aspects of a production account, you may encounter some differences due to its construction as a simulator with no execution or clearing abilities. These differences include but are not limited to:

  • No support for some order types including: VWAP, Auction, RFQ, and Pegged to Market.
  • Fills are simulated from the top of the book; no deep book access.
  • Limited combo trading.
  • Stops and other complex order types are always simulated in paper trading; this may result in slightly different behavior from a production account.
  • Penny trading for US Options is not supported. You will be able to submit the order but it will not receive a penny fill.
  • The trade simulator will reject the remainder of any exchange-directed market order that partially executes. This may or may not match behavior of a real-world exchange. Market orders received while there is no quote on the opposite side will be held until the market data arrives (i.e. until the first partial fill).
  • Complex or Leveraged products are not available; including Gold, HKFE Hang Seng Index derivatives, CME CF Bitcoin Rate Futures, and CCMC securities.
How to create your own trading account 
Run a Trading Competition

The Student Trading Lab lets professors run a simulated trading competition using real Interactive Brokers infrastructure — not a game-style simulator. This page provides a guide to the competition setup and management functions available in Client Portal.

Why Run a Competition 

The Student Trading Lab is free to use and gives students access to a powerful trading platform and global markets. Each account is funded with USD 1,000,000 in simulated equity and configured for paper trading. Students build real trading, programming, and risk management skills—experience they can highlight to potential employers.

Set Up Your Competition

  1. Open a Professor account and use it to invite your students to create their own accounts 
  2. Decide the competition format — determine whether students will compete individually or in groups, working together as a team (like a hedge fund).
  3. Set competition rules — e.g., instruct students to only trade stocks or derivatives, use at least two or three order types, and compare performance against a benchmark (like the S&P 500). These rules aren't enforced by the platform, so you'll need to communicate them directly to students and monitor compliance yourself.
  4. Set a competition period (start and end dates).
  5. Set expectations — require a trading plan beforehand and a trading retrospective after the event.

Monitor the Competition

As this is a brokerage platform being used for realistic trading practice, it does not support a built-in leaderboard. Use these Client Portal tools to track performance yourself:

  • Dashboard – quick overview of student account activity. 
  • Statements – detailed performance and trading history per student.
  • Flex Queries – custom reports pulled across all student accounts, useful for building your own rankings. 

Important: These are paper trading accounts on a brokerage platform, not a game simulator — compile rankings privately and share results with students through a private channel (LMS, email), not by exposing account-level detail broadly.

Suggested Competition Checklist

Before: Set rules & benchmark → set dates → invite students → confirm accounts are configured → collect trading plans → set up Flex Query template

During: Generate reports weekly → compile rankings → share standings privately

After: Compile final report → share final results → collect student retrospectives → archive template for reuse

Resources

 
Additional Resources