A practice account fills every order at exactly the price its signal sent, and on its own charges nothing for it. No real account trades like that: an order that follows a TradingView alert usually fills a tick or two away from the chart's price, and every round trip pays commission. Practice costs make a Simulated connection do the same, so a strategy that only works for free shows up before a real account trades it.
Set them
In Automation, open the Simulated connection. Press Settings on a desktop, or the cog and Connection settings on a phone.
Under Practice costs, pick Off, Low, High or Custom. Each shows its slippage on a fill and its commission on a round trip, and what one MNQ and one NQ round trip then cost.
Press Save.
Off is how a Simulated connection starts. Low slips each fill by up to a tick against you and charges $1.00 a round trip on a micro contract and $3.00 on a full-size one. High slips each fill by up to three ticks and charges $1.50 and $5.00.
Custom
Slippage, each fill: Fixed slips every fill by the same number of ticks. Range picks a number between From and To for each fill. A negative number is a fill better than the signal's price, so −1 to 3 is anything from a tick better to three ticks worse.
Commission, each contract's round trip: one figure for micros, such as MNQ and MES, and one for full-size contracts, such as NQ and ES. Your firm's own rates are a good place to start.
A buy slips up and a sell slips down, on the way in and on the way out. Commission is charged when a trade closes, for each contract that closes.
What changes
The costs apply from the next fill. A position that is already open keeps the price it got.
A practice account's balance and its result today are after commission, so its daily limits judge what is really left.
The Journal shows each practice trade's fees and its slippage. The slippage is already in the entry and exit prices, so it is part of the result, not a cost on top of it.
Only Simulated connections have practice costs. A broker account pays what its broker charges.
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