Demo Account

A demo account gives you the real platform, the real charts and a live price feed. What it does not give you is an order that has to find a real counterparty. Your fills come from a simulator, and simulators are kind. ### What the demo quietly deletes Traders who run demo and live side by side notice it fast. In a long-running [EarnForex forum thread](https://www.earnforex.com/forum/threads/demo-vs-live-accounts-slippage-and-spreads.33522/) on exactly this question, the site's administrator writes that "slippage is nearly always absent in demo accounts", and that demo accounts lack the spread widening that is routine during news releases and around the New York close. Another trader in the thread draws the obvious conclusion: this is why a strategy can work on a demo account and then fail on a live one. The quotes on your demo screen can look like the live ones. The execution does not. Slippage on your entry, slippage on your stop, and spreads that stretch at exactly the moments you most want to be trading are all costs the simulator forgets to charge you. An edge thinner than those costs can look fine on demo and bleed live. ### The two jobs it actually does *Platform fluency.* Placing, modifying and closing orders. Attaching a stop. Finding out what a button does before finding out the expensive way. Every one of those mistakes is free here. *Rule testing.* Does this rule even fire? Can I execute it in the session I actually trade, at the hour I am actually awake, without staring at a screen all day? Demo answers that honestly, because those answers do not depend on the fills. ### The mistake almost everyone makes "I'll demo until I'm consistently profitable." Consistency on demo is not evidence, because the hardest inputs are switched off: fear, the pull to size up, the urge to win a loss back. You are passing a test that does not contain the questions. And the environment you are graduating into is genuinely harsher. When ESMA announced its CFD restrictions on 27 March 2018, it pointed to analysis showing that [74-89% of retail accounts typically lose money](https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-agrees-prohibit-binary-options-and-restrict-cfds-protect-retail-investors), and it required providers to carry a standardised risk warning stating the loss percentage on their own retail accounts. Graduate by size, not by feeling. Start live at the smallest size that still feels slightly uncomfortable, because discomfort is the exact variable demo cannot simulate. It is the one thing you have to buy with real money.