Replay: practise a trading session before you risk a cent
Replay plays a real past day back to you one candle at a time — jump to the London or New York open, trade it with play money, and review the result. Here is what it is and how to run your first session.
There is a gap in every beginner's trading education that nobody talks about honestly. You can read about support and resistance for a month. You can watch a hundred hours of "how I trade the London open". And then you sit in front of a live chart, price starts moving, and you discover that knowing what a setup looks like afterwards has almost nothing to do with recognising it while it forms.
That gap is what Replay is for.
What Replay actually is
Replay takes a real trading day from the past and plays it back to you one candle at a time. Not a screenshot, not a summary — the actual minute-by-minute price of gold, EURUSD, GBPJPY or Bitcoin on a day you choose, forming on the chart the way it formed for everyone watching it live.
You can pause. You can step forward one candle at a time. You can run it at half speed while you think, or at 20× while you wait for the session to get interesting. And you can trade it: buy or sell with a stop loss and a take profit, watch your P&L move, get stopped out, get paid — with play money, on a market that already happened.
Why "jump to the session open" matters
Most replay tools drop you at midnight and leave you to scroll. That sounds like a small thing until you realise how much of a beginner's practice time it eats. Retrace's Replay starts with a question instead: where should this begin?
- Asia open — Tokyo, 09:00 local. Quiet, range-building hours. Good for learning what "nothing is happening" looks like so you stop forcing trades into it.
- London open — 08:00 London. Europe wakes up, volume arrives, the day's first real moves. This is where most intraday setups live.
- New York open — 08:00 New York. US news, momentum, and the London/New York overlap.
Pick a market, pick a day, pick an open, press play. The first candle on your screen is the one that mattered.
How to run your first session
- Open Replay from the sidebar.
- Pick something you already watch — if that's gold, pick gold. Familiarity means you're practising recognition, not learning a new instrument.
- Choose a weekday. Don't overthink it. If you don't know which, hit Surprise me.
- Choose London open and the M5 timeframe. It's fast enough to stay interesting and slow enough to think.
- Press Play at 1×. That's one minute of market per second — a five-minute candle takes five seconds to form.
Then do the single most useful thing a beginner can do: don't trade for the first ten candles. Just watch. Say out loud what you think happens next. Be wrong. Notice how it felt to be wrong. That's the muscle.
Trading it
When you do see something, the ticket is deliberately simple. Pick a size in lots, a stop in pips, a target in pips. The ticket shows what that stop costs in dollars and what the target pays, and the reward-to-risk ratio — so a 20-pip stop with a 40-pip target reads as 2.0R before you click anything.
Buy or Sell. Your entry, stop and target draw on the chart. Keep playing. If price hits your stop, the position closes at the stop and tells you. If it hits the target, same. You can close early or move the stop to break-even with one tap.
Nothing here touches your real journal or a broker. It's a sandbox with real prices.
What the results tell you
When you end the session, Replay shows a short review: net P&L, number of trades, win rate, your best and worst trade. It's kept in your replay history so you can see how the same market treated you across different days.
Two honest warnings about those numbers:
A great result on one day proves nothing. So does a terrible one. Ten sessions on the same market start to mean something.
Replay fills at the exact stop and target price. Live markets have spread and slippage. Treat replay results as slightly optimistic and you'll be calibrated.
Who this is for
Beginners, obviously — this is the fastest way we know to turn "I've read about it" into "I've seen it a hundred times". But also anyone coming back after a break, anyone learning a new session, and anyone who wants to test whether their rules survive contact with a day they've never seen.
Replay is available on every plan. Free accounts get three sessions a day — a full trading day of candles in each; Pro is unlimited and keeps going past the day. Either way, the candles are real, the day already happened, and the only thing at risk is your ego.