Getting Started with EP Trade

Create your account

Go to the dashboard and click Sign Up below the login form. You'll need an email address and a password — that's it, no broker details required yet. This creates your own account with its own trades, buckets, and settings, separate from anyone else on the platform.

Connect your IIFL broker account

EP Trade currently supports IIFL Securities as the connected broker. Once logged in, open Settings → Connections and you'll see a form asking for four values:

• IIFL Client ID
• Interactive API Key and Interactive API Secret
• Marketdata API Key and Marketdata API Secret

These come from IIFL's own API access program, not from your regular trading login/password (EP Trade never asks for those). If you don't already have API keys, you'll need to request API trading access on your IIFL account first — contact IIFL directly (your relationship manager or their support desk) to get API access enabled and receive your Interactive and Marketdata key/secret pairs. This is a one-time setup on IIFL's side.

Paste all four values into the form and save. Your keys are stored against your account only — no one else on the platform can see them, and they're never written to any shared configuration file.

Understand paper mode

Every account starts in paper mode, and the platform enforces this — it's not a checkbox you can turn off from the credentials form. In paper mode, the system connects to IIFL for real, live market data and goes through the entire real trading pipeline (signals, checklist, sizing, order placement), but no real order is actually sent to the exchange and no real capital moves. It's a full dress rehearsal against live prices, with nothing at risk. See our piece on why paper trading first actually matters for the reasoning behind this being mandatory, not optional.

Set up your first bucket

A bucket is a self-contained pool of capital with its own risk settings — think of it as a separate strategy sleeve. From the Funds & Buckets tab, create one with:

• Capital — the (paper) amount this bucket trades with
• Risk % per trade — how much of that capital is risked on any single position
• Strategy filter — which of the platform's strategies this bucket acts on, or manual if you only want to place trades yourself

You can run multiple buckets with different risk profiles side by side — see our note on how position sizing scales per bucket if you want the mechanics.

Watch it run

Once a bucket is active, the platform scans automatically during NSE market hours (9:15 AM–3:30 PM IST), gates every signal through the pre-trade checklist, sizes and places paper orders, and monitors open positions for stop-loss/target exits — all without you needing to watch it live. Check the Overview tab for your current position, Learnings for the nightly and weekly reflections on how things are going, and the Kill Switch status for whether the platform has paused itself after a losing streak.