tradThe question comes up often, and the honest answer depends on what you want to measure with it.
WHAT PAPER TRADING MEASURES WELL. Your ability to recognise a setup, to read it at the right moment, and to follow a written plan. That can be trained without money, and it transfers.
WHAT IT DOES NOT MEASURE. Everything that exists precisely because money is on the line. Exiting before target, sizing up after a loss, skipping the planned entry because the last one failed. Those three do not show up in simulation, and they are the ones a journal surfaces first for most people.
Hence the gap so many describe: clean months on paper, then a first live month that looks like someone else's account. The simulation was not lying, it simply was not measuring that half.
WHAT YOU CAN STILL DO WITH IT, and this is where keeping a journal earns its place. Same journal on paper and live, same columns, then compare the two series. The gap between them IS a measurement: it tells you what money costs you, in R, instead of as an impression.
AND SIZE MATTERS. A simulation at a hundred times your real size teaches nothing, because nothing there hurts. At your real size, it teaches a great deal more.
One note on method to close: the move from paper to live is judged on a series, never on a single trade. The first live trade rarely goes well, whatever the preparation.