Paper Trading with IBKR Web API

When you want to do paper trading with the IBKR web API, you will find that the login panel of the API gateway doesn’t have a toggle to switch between Live and Paper accounts like the normal IBKR web portal. After some searching, it turns out that every IBKR live account is associated with a paper account. When you log in to the web portal in paper mode, you are actually logging into the associated paper account. No surprise, you can find the actual paper account and log in directly with it.

To get your paper account, first log in to the portal, then visit the Account Management page. Go to Paper Trading Account, and you will see your paper trading username. If this is your first time visiting this page, you will need to reset your paper trading password to obtain your password.

Again, IBKR’s product design is very user-unfriendly and the documentation is poor.