This is the first version of While25 anyone outside our team has ever seen.
v1.0.0 just shipped. If you joined the waitlist, you can use it free for two months — register, download, plug in your broker, run a backtest before lunch.
We could have stayed in private for another six months. Polishing. Trying to anticipate every broker quirk and every weird strategy a real trader might write. We chose not to. We'd rather ship now and learn from real traders than guess in a vacuum.
There will be rough edges. Things will break in ways we haven't anticipated. Here's what we can promise: every bug you hit gets triaged, every piece of feedback shapes what comes next, and we keep shipping until this is genuinely worthy of the trades you make on it.
What While25 Is
A desktop trading terminal for Indian markets — backtesting, strategy building, and paper trading on real-time data. Built for retail and prop traders who want institutional-grade tools without the institutional price tag.
It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It connects to your broker. It gives you one window for market watch, portfolio, backtests, and charts — instead of five tabs and three subscriptions.
What's In v1.0.0
The release is deliberately scoped. We built the things that matter most for the first month of real-trader use, and left the rest for the upcoming versions.
Live in v1.0.0:
- Backtesting with Monte Carlo bands and MAE/MFE per trade — so you see not just average returns, but the realistic distribution of outcomes and how each trade ran while it was open.
- Paper trading through the Upstox sandbox on real-time market data. The same engine that will route live orders later is what runs your paper fills today.
- Single-instrument strategy builder — define entries, exits, stops, sizing, and let the engine handle the rest.
- Charts with drawing tools — trendlines, levels, the basics that let you actually look at what you're trading.
- In-app feedback and announcements — the FEEDBACK button at the top of the terminal sends bug reports straight to us.
What is not yet in v1.0.0, and is on the next few releases:
- Multi-timeframe strategies
- Pair-stat, options, basket, and dynamic-hedge strategies
- Live order routing — this arrives with the cloud-hosted version we're building next
We'd rather ship a small thing that works than a big thing that almost works.
A Note On The Backtester
Most retail backtesters lie to you. They show one equity curve, one Sharpe, one drawdown number — and that one number quietly hides how lucky or unlucky the path was.
While25's backtester runs Monte Carlo over your trade sequence and shows the band of outcomes a strategy could realistically produce, not just the one it happened to. You see the median path, the 5th-percentile path, and the 95th-percentile path side by side. A strategy that looks great on the median but has a 5th-percentile drawdown of 60% is a strategy that will eventually find that 60%.
We also expose MAE (maximum adverse excursion) and MFE (maximum favourable excursion) per trade — how far each trade went against you before it worked, and how much you left on the table when it did. These two numbers tell you whether your stops are too tight, your targets too greedy, or your entries genuinely good.
It is the same view a prop desk uses to pressure-test a system before sizing it up. Now it sits inside a free desktop app on your laptop.
The First Ten Minutes
If you came in from the waitlist email, the path looks like this.
1. Register. Go to while25.com/register. The two-month beta licence applies automatically when your account is created. If you registered earlier, log in and skip to step two.
2. Download. Head to while25.com/download and pick macOS, Windows, or Linux. The download page walks through the install — including the one-time xattr workaround macOS needs for unsigned beta binaries. This is a normal beta-software step; signed builds come with the next release.
3. Connect Upstox. Beta supports Upstox as the broker. The download page has the full walkthrough — which Upstox app type to pick (Algo Trading, not Analytics) and the exact Redirect URI to paste in. Don't skip this part. Picking the wrong app type is the single most common setup mistake.
About ten minutes end-to-end. Then you can build a strategy, run a backtest, and watch a paper trade fill on real-time data.
Why Now, And Why Public
There's a version of this product launch where we wait. Add multi-timeframe. Add options. Hit twenty-five "must-have" features before letting anyone in.
We've watched too many tools die that way. The ones that survive ship early, listen hard, and rebuild on what they learn. The bug a real trader hits in week one is worth more than a hundred features we imagined in a planning doc.
So: this is day one. The terminal works. It is not finished. Those are not the same thing.
How To Help Us
Use the FEEDBACK button heavily. It is wired straight into our triage. Bug reports, "this is confusing", "the chart should do X", "Upstox auth failed at this step" — all of it.
For longer thoughts, reply to the launch email or write to support@while25.com. We read everything.
If you're on the waitlist and haven't registered yet, today is the day. The licence is free for two months. The terminal is on your desk. The next version is shaped by what you tell us between now and then.
Welcome to v1.0.0.
— The While25 team