Demo Trading Account: What Actually Prepares You for Real Money

By Jakub Rož · Founder & CEO, For Traders

A demo trading account is a free, simulated environment where you place trades using virtual money on live market data — useful for learning platform mechanics and testing strategies, but limited in replicating the fills, spreads, and psychological pressure of real capital.

Key takeaways

• Demo accounts use live price feeds but simulated execution — fills and slippage are almost always better than live conditions.
• The biggest gap between demo and live isn't technical, it's psychological: risk-free clicks build habits that break under real money pressure.
• Most brokers offer free demo accounts indefinitely; some expire after 30-90 days unless you fund an account.
• A simulated funded account (prop challenge) sits between demo and live — real rules, real payout potential, no personal capital at risk.
• Structured demo practice with a journal, fixed size, and defined exit criteria beats unlimited demo grinding every time.
• For serious traders, the jump from demo to a prop firm evaluation is often smarter than risking personal capital.

Watch: related video

What Is a Demo Trading Account?

A demo trading account is a simulated trading environment that mirrors a live platform in real time — same charts, same price feeds, same order types — but every trade you place is executed against virtual money, not real capital. Nothing you do in a demo account affects your bank balance, which is exactly the point.

How Demo Accounts Work Technically

The mechanics are straightforward but worth understanding. A broker or platform provider connects your demo environment to a live market data feed — the same tick-by-tick price stream flowing into real accounts. When you hit "buy" on XAUUSD at 2,345.60, your order routes to a simulated matching engine that processes the fill using the current bid/ask spread. No liquidity provider is involved, no real counterparty takes the other side. The engine simply records the transaction and adjusts your virtual balance accordingly.

This is why demo fills are almost always cleaner than live fills. There's no real order book to push through, no partial fills on a thin NFP morning, no re-quotes during an FOMC spike. The simulated matching engine fills you at the price you saw, or very close to it — a behaviour that diverges meaningfully from live execution under volatile conditions.

Virtual Money vs Simulated Capital

Here's a distinction most guides skip over: not all "demo" environments are the same thing.

• A free demo account (offered by brokers and platforms) gives you a fixed pot of virtual money — typically $10,000 to $100,000 — to explore the platform and test strategies. There's no evaluation criteria, no consequence for blowing the account, and no payout at the end. It's a practice trading account, full stop.
• A simulated funded account — the kind used in prop firm challenges — also runs on simulated capital against live data, but the rules change everything. You're assessed against drawdown limits, profit targets, and consistency requirements. Pass the evaluation, and you receive performance rewards tied to simulated profits. The capital is still virtual, but the stakes are structured and real in terms of outcome.

That second category is what separates a demo account for trading practice from a prop firm evaluation environment. Same underlying technology, completely different psychological and financial context.

Why Every Platform Offers One

Brokers offer demo accounts because an educated user is a retained user. If you spend two weeks learning an order management system, customising your workspace, and getting comfortable with the platform's charting tools, you're far less likely to switch to a competitor when you fund a live account. It's retention strategy dressed as generosity — and that's fine, because the tool itself is genuinely useful.

Prop firms offer simulated environments for the same reason, plus one more: the evaluation structure requires a controlled, reproducible trading environment that can be monitored and scored. A live brokerage account can't be paused, reset, or evaluated against standardised rules the same way a simulated account can. The demo infrastructure makes the entire prop model possible.

Understanding this — that the demo account exists to serve the platform's interests as much as yours — helps you use it with the right expectations from day one.

Demo Account vs Simulated Funded Account vs Live Account

Most traders treat these three environments as variations of the same thing. They're not. Each one operates under different rules, different consequences, and different psychological conditions — and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make early in your trading career.

The Three-Tier Reality of Modern Trading Practice

Think of the three environments as a progression, not a menu. Each tier exists for a specific purpose, and jumping tiers too early is where most retail traders haemorrhage money.

Demo account: Free, unlimited, reset-able. You're trading virtual money with no rules, no time limits, and zero financial consequence. Spreads are typically tighter than live, fills are near-instant, and there's no margin call that actually stings. It's the right environment for learning platform mechanics, building a strategy from scratch, and testing ideas before they cost you anything. The limitation is equally real: because nothing is at stake, your psychology is essentially switched off. You'll hold losers longer, size up recklessly, and take setups you'd never touch with real money on the line.

Simulated funded account (prop firm challenge): This is the middle tier most retail traders skip entirely — and it's the one that closes the gap between demo and live. You're still trading simulated capital, but now there are strict rules: daily loss limits, maximum drawdown thresholds, minimum trading days, and profit targets you need to hit within defined parameters. Pass the evaluation and you earn performance rewards tied to your simulated results. The rules create real pressure without requiring you to risk your own capital. The psychological load is measurably higher than a standard demo, because failure has a tangible cost — your challenge fee.

Live account: Your own money, real fills, real slippage, real emotions. A 20-pip stop that gets taken out at 23 pips due to slippage on an NFP release hits differently when it's your rent money. Execution quality varies by broker, spreads widen in volatile conditions, and the psychological weight of a drawdown is a completely different animal than anything you experience in demo or even a prop challenge.

Where Prop Firm Challenges Fit

A prop firm challenge — like those offered by For Traders — occupies a precise niche: it's a structured, rules-based environment using simulated capital, but with real stakes attached (your evaluation fee and your performance rewards). It's not a broker. It's not a demo. It's the closest most retail traders will get to professional accountability without funding their own live account with five or six figures.

The challenge format forces discipline that a free demo never can. A daily loss limit of 4% doesn't mean anything when you can reset with a click. It means everything when blowing it ends your evaluation.

Which One You Actually Need

The routing most modern retail traders should follow is demo → simulated funded (prop challenge) → real capital — not the old-school demo → live jump that wipes out the majority of new accounts within the first year.

Use demo until your strategy has a documented edge over at least 50–100 trades. Move to a prop challenge to stress-test that edge under real rules and real consequences. Only route to a live account once you've demonstrated you can operate within structured risk parameters — because the live market has no reset button and no customer support ticket that gives you your money back.

Are Demo Trading Accounts Really Free?

Most demo trading accounts cost you nothing upfront — but "free" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The real costs are just less visible than a price tag.

The Genuinely Free Options

Several platforms offer demo environments with no strings attached, at least on the surface. A MetaTrader 4 demo account from most brokers is free and, in many cases, runs indefinitely — you get full platform access, virtual capital, and a price feed without handing over a card number. MT5 works the same way. cTrader demos follow a similar model.

TradingView paper trading is probably the cleanest free option available right now. It sits inside the charting interface you're likely already using, requires no separate account, and has no expiry. You can run a paper portfolio alongside your live charts with zero friction. That's genuinely useful for strategy testing, even if the fill simulation is simplified.

On the futures side, NinjaTrader offers a free demo with simulated order routing, and Tradovate provides demo access with market data — though live CME data typically requires a subscription; the free tier often runs on a delay. For learning platform mechanics and order types, a 10-minute delay doesn't matter much. For timing entries around FOMC or NFP, it matters a lot.

When Demo Accounts Expire

Not all demos run forever. Many retail broker demos — particularly those on white-label MT4 setups — expire after 30, 60, or 90 days of inactivity. Some reset your balance. Some simply lock you out and redirect you to a live account application. If you're mid-way through a 100-trade sample and your demo account vanishes, that's a genuine disruption to your process.

Check the expiry policy before you commit a testing period to any platform. The brokers that offer indefinite demos tend to advertise it; the ones that don't, bury the expiry terms in the FAQ.

The Catch: What You're Really Paying With

Here's what the free demo is actually costing you. First, your data. Every interaction — what instruments you trade, what hours you're active, how you respond to drawdown — feeds a marketing profile. That profile is used to convert you into a live depositor. The demo is the top of a funnel, not a neutral educational service.

Second, your time. A demo account at a retail broker is designed to feel good enough that you stay, but not so complete that you stop needing guidance. The conversion goal is a live deposit, not a skilled trader.

Prop firm challenges operate differently. The demo environment itself — the simulated capital, the risk rules, the drawdown limits — is free to access conceptually, but the evaluation challenge has a fee. You're paying for the structure, the accountability, and the possibility of a funded account on the other side. That's a different value proposition than a broker demo, and it's worth being clear-eyed about the distinction before you pay for one.

The most honest framing: broker demos and TradingView paper trading are free tools with a conversion agenda. Prop challenges are paid evaluations with a performance reward on the other side. Neither is inherently better — they serve different stages of development.

The Five Ways Demo Trading Lies to You

A demo account is not a simulation of trading — it's a simulation of the best possible version of trading. The fills are cleaner, the spreads are tighter, and there's no cortisol in your bloodstream when the position goes against you. Each of those gaps has a real cost when you eventually go live.

Perfect fills that vanish on live

On demo, your limit order at 1.0850 fills at 1.0850. Every time. In live markets, especially around high-impact events like NFP, FOMC, or CPI, price can gap straight through your level and fill you 5, 10, or 20 pips worse. That's slippage — and it doesn't exist in most demo environments. The result is that you back-test and demo-trade a strategy with a 1.8 R:R, go live, and watch it collapse to 1.2 because every entry and exit is slightly worse than your model assumed. The edge you thought you had was partly a demo artefact.

Spreads and slippage that don't reflect reality

Demo platforms typically display the tightest quoted spread — the best-case number. Live spreads on XAUUSD can widen from 20 cents to over $2 during rollover or a volatility spike. Forex majors that show 0.1-pip spreads on demo can blow out to 3–5 pips in the two minutes around a tier-one data release. If your strategy involves trading news or holding positions through the New York close, you're building P&L assumptions on numbers that won't exist when real money — or real performance rewards — are on the line.

No emotional weight behind the click

This is the one that ends most funded accounts. On demo, a losing trade is an intellectual event. You watch the drawdown, note it, maybe journal it, and move on. There is no cortisol response, no tightening in your chest, no 3 a.m. check on your phone. So demo quietly trains a dangerous habit: holding a loser just to see if it comes back. That habit costs nothing on simulated capital. On a live account — or a prop challenge with a max drawdown limit — it's the single most common reason traders get stopped out. Trading psychology isn't something you can study; it's something you have to experience under pressure, and demo removes the pressure entirely.

Unlimited redos rewire your discipline

Reset the account. Start again. Demo culture normalises the idea that a bad run is reversible. It isn't, in any environment that matters. When you can blow up and restart without consequence, you never develop the position-sizing discipline that comes from treating every single trade like it counts. Traders who've spent months on unlimited-reset demos often over-size their first live trades — not from greed, but because the concept of a trade being genuinely irreversible hasn't been internalised yet.

Missing partial fills and requotes

If you're trading ES or NQ futures, this one matters a lot. In live futures markets, a limit order for 10 contracts at a specific tick might fill 3 contracts immediately, 5 more on the next tick, and leave 2 unfilled if price moves away. Demo platforms almost universally simulate the entire order as a single clean fill. That means your entry price, your average cost, and your actual risk are all slightly fictional. For scalpers and short-term futures traders, partial fills aren't an edge case — they're a routine feature of execution that demo simply doesn't replicate.

Best Demo Trading Accounts by Asset Class

No single demo platform leads across every market — the best choice depends entirely on what you trade. Here's where each major platform genuinely pulls ahead, and where it falls short.

Best Forex Demo Account — EUR/USD and Majors

MetaTrader 5 is the practical standard for forex demo trading in 2025. The platform handles EUR/USD and all major pairs natively, supports pending orders, trailing stops, and custom indicators, and lets you run automated strategies through Expert Advisors — all in demo. cTrader is a genuine alternative if you want a cleaner ECN-style interface and better depth-of-market visibility. The critical variable isn't the platform itself, though — it's the broker feed behind it. A demo account pulling from a thin liquidity provider will show spreads that bear no resemblance to what you'd see live during NFP or FOMC. Choose a demo attached to a regulated broker with a real institutional feed.

Best Gold and CFD Demo — XAUUSD

XAUUSD is the most-traded instrument on For Traders' evaluation platform — not a side asset, the centre of gravity. For demo purposes, MetaTrader 5 handles gold CFDs better than MT4 because of its improved tick data granularity and depth-of-market panel. The honest caveat: demo spreads on XAUUSD are almost always tighter than live, particularly around London open and major macro events when real spreads can spike to 50–80 pips momentarily. If you're building a gold strategy in demo, manually widen your assumed spread by at least 10–15 pips on any news-adjacent trade to stress-test your edge honestly.

Best Day Trading Demo Account for Futures — ES and NQ

For ES and NQ simulation, NinjaTrader and Tradovate both use CME Globex data in their sim environments, which means tick increments and session hours are accurate. NinjaTrader's Market Replay feature is particularly useful — you can replay historical sessions tick by tick, which is closer to real execution practice than standard demo. Tradovate's web-based sim is cleaner for beginners. Neither fully replicates partial fills or queue position on the DOM, but they're the most realistic futures environments available without a live account.

Best Crypto Demo Account — BTC and Altcoins

TradingView's paper trading mode pulls price data directly from exchange feeds — Binance, Coinbase, Bybit — so BTC and major altcoin prices are accurate. Coverage across altcoins is broad enough for most strategies. What it doesn't simulate: perpetual funding rates, liquidation cascades, or order book depth. If your crypto strategy depends on reading the book or timing funding flips, TradingView paper trading will give you a cleaner picture than reality. Use it for chart-based setups; don't use it to validate anything that depends on microstructure.

Best All-in-One Platform Demo

Interactive Brokers' paper trading account is the most comprehensive multi-asset demo environment available to retail traders. Stocks, options, futures, forex, and bonds — all in a single account with realistic margin calculations. The interface is dense, and the learning curve is real. For a trader who needs to test a strategy that spans asset classes — say, a macro approach that touches NQ futures, gold, and EUR/USD — IBKR paper trading is the only demo that handles all three in one place without switching platforms.

How to Use a Demo Account Without Wasting Time

The difference between a demo account that accelerates your development and one that gives you a false sense of readiness comes down to structure. Most traders treat demo like a video game with infinite lives — and then wonder why they freeze when real money is on the line.

Here's the tactical framework that actually transfers.

Trade the Size You'd Trade Live, Not $100k on Every Click

If your live account or prop firm challenge will be funded at $10,000, set your demo balance to $10,000. Not $100,000. The position sizing habits you build in practice are the ones you'll default to under pressure. A trader who's been risking $2,000 per trade on a bloated demo balance doesn't suddenly develop the discipline to risk $200 when it counts. Your practice trading account should feel uncomfortably close to the real thing — because that's the only way the muscle memory transfers.

Set an Expiry Date and Stop

Give yourself a defined demo period — 30, 60, or 90 days maximum — with specific graduation criteria written down before you start. Something like: "I'll move to live after 60 days if my win rate is above 45%, average R:R is above 1.8, and I haven't blown a simulated daily loss limit in the final three weeks." Without a deadline, demo becomes indefinite grinding dressed up as preparation. The market will always feel uncertain. At some point you have to step through the door.

Journal Every Trade Like It's Real

Every entry needs a reason. Every exit needs a reason. Log your emotional state before you place the trade, not just the setup. A trading journal that only records price levels is a spreadsheet — a journal that records "I was impatient and entered early because I didn't want to miss the move" is a diagnostic tool. Note your R:R target before entry, your actual exit R:R, and what you'd do differently. Do this on demo and you'll already have the habit locked in when the stakes are real.

Test One Specific Hypothesis at a Time

Pick one thing per session: a specific entry trigger, a new stop placement method, a particular session time. Not five things at once. If you're testing whether a pullback entry on the London open outperforms a breakout entry, test that — and only that — for two weeks. When you mix variables, you can't isolate what's working. Your day trading demo account is a lab, not a playground. Treat it accordingly.

Simulate the Rules of Your Next Account (Prop or Live)

This is the most underused and most powerful step. If you're preparing for a prop firm challenge, pull up the exact rules — max DD, daily loss limit, minimum trading days — and enforce them on your demo account manually, right now. If the challenge has a 5% daily loss limit, stop trading the moment your simulated balance drops 5% in a session. Don't wait until you're in the real evaluation to discover how that constraint changes your decision-making mid-trade. Mirror the environment you're moving into as precisely as possible, and the transition from demo to funded account becomes a formality rather than a shock.

Why Traders Who Profit on Demo Lose on Live

The gap between demo performance and live performance isn't a strategy problem — it's a physiology problem. Studies on trading psychology consistently show that real financial loss activates the same stress response as physical threat. Your demo P&L doesn't do that. Your live account does.

You can run a 70% win rate on demo for three months and still blow a live account in the first two weeks. It happens constantly, and the mechanism is almost always the same: the plan was built in a cortisol-free environment and then executed in one that isn't.

The Cortisol Tax

When real money is at risk, cortisol and adrenaline enter the equation. These aren't metaphors — they're hormones that measurably impair the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for rule-following and long-term thinking. On demo, a 50-pip drawdown is a data point. On live, it's a bill you haven't paid yet. The result is that traders who held positions calmly through pullbacks on demo suddenly find themselves exiting at the first red candle, cutting winners short, and letting losers run because closing them would make the loss "real." The trade execution looks identical. The internal experience is completely different.

Position Sizing Panic

Demo-to-live failure is almost always a position sizing story. A trader who consistently risked 1–2% per trade on demo suddenly drops to 0.1% because "it's real money now" — then overcorrects to 5% after a string of winners because confidence spikes. Neither reflects the plan. The 2R setups that looked clean on demo get closed at 0.5R live because the trader decides to "take what they can get." That one habit alone turns a profitable strategy into a losing one. If your risk parameters aren't identical between demo and live, your results won't be either.

The 'I Can Always Redo' Habit

Demo accounts are infinite. Blow one, open another. That unlimited redo mindset embeds itself deeper than most traders realise. On demo, abandoning a plan after one losing trade carries no consequence — you reset and start over. On live, that same reflex means you're switching strategies after every drawdown, never giving any approach enough sample size to prove itself. The first loser on a live account feels existential in a way demo never trained you for. Traders who haven't deliberately practised sitting through planned losses on demo are almost guaranteed to bail on their system the moment live trading gets uncomfortable.

News Event Execution Reality

FOMC and NFP releases are where demo education and live reality diverge most violently. On a demo platform, you enter a news trade and get filled at the price you clicked. In live markets during high-impact events, spreads on XAUUSD can widen from 20 cents to $3–5 in seconds, slippage is measured in tens of pips, and stop orders execute at prices you didn't plan for. Demo taught you the setup — the directional bias, the level, the trigger. It did not teach you the execution reality. Traders who've only ever traded NFP on demo genuinely don't know what a live fill looks like during the first 90 seconds of that release. That ignorance is expensive.

The fix isn't to avoid demo — it's to use it knowing exactly what it can't replicate, and to engineer your demo sessions to close those gaps as deliberately as possible.

From Demo to Funded: The Prop Firm Path

The smartest bridge between demo trading and real-stakes performance isn't a small live account — it's a prop firm evaluation. You trade simulated capital, but under genuine constraints that force the discipline a live account demands from day one.

Why a prop challenge is a better bridge than a small live account

Most traders graduate demo by depositing $500 into a retail account and immediately discovering that their position sizing, their patience, and their loss tolerance all behave differently when real money is on the line. The problem: $500 is small enough to feel disposable, so the psychological pressure never fully arrives — but large enough to sting when it's gone.

A prop firm challenge flips that dynamic. You pay a one-time challenge fee — skin in the game — and you trade a simulated account worth $25,000, $100,000, or more. The fee is real. That changes behaviour. Traders who've paid for a challenge report treating every session with the same focus they'd give a live account, because blowing the evaluation has a tangible cost. The simulated capital is large enough that proper position sizing actually matters, yet the structure protects you from catastrophic personal loss while you're still developing consistency.

What changes when simulated capital has real rules

A standard demo account has no rules. You can lose 40% in a day, reset, and carry on. A prop firm evaluation runs on simulated capital but with hard constraints that mirror what professional risk desks enforce: a daily loss limit, a maximum drawdown, and often a minimum number of trading days to prevent lucky one-day passes. Break any one of those rules and the evaluation ends — regardless of your overall P&L.

Those constraints are the psychological bridge. They force you to think about risk in percentage terms rather than dollar amounts, to respect position sizing on every single trade, and to manage losing streaks without revenge trading. That's not demo behaviour. That's live-account discipline — and you're building it before you've put significant personal capital at risk.

Structuring your demo phase to pass an evaluation

If your goal is a funded account, your demo phase should be designed around evaluation metrics from the start, not retrofitted later. That means:

1. Trade within the drawdown limits you'll face. Most evaluations cap max drawdown at 8–10%. Set that ceiling in your demo journal and treat breaching it as a failed session — full stop.
2. Log minimum trading days as a habit. Evaluations typically require 5–10 minimum trading days. Practice consistency over a 30-day window, not a 3-day hot streak.
3. Simulate the profit target timeline. If the evaluation requires a 10% gain without breaching drawdown, model what that looks like across 20 trading days at your average R:R. Know the math before you pay the fee.
4. Trade the exact instruments you'll use in the challenge. XAUUSD, US100, ES/NQ futures — get your fills, spreads, and volatility patterns locked in on demo first.

For Traders: demo practice into a funded pathway

For Traders is built specifically for this transition. Traders who've developed a strategy on demo can move directly into a Two-Step Challenge — where you hit a profit target across two phases before receiving a funded account — or an Instant Funding path if you want to skip the evaluation phase entirely and start generating performance rewards sooner.

The instrument list matches what serious demo traders are already working with: XAUUSD (the platform's most-traded market), US100, and CME futures including ES and NQ. You're not switching instruments mid-transition — you're applying a tested edge to the same charts under real rules. That continuity matters more than most traders realise when they're mapping the demo-to-funded gap.

Disclosure: For Traders is the publisher of this article.

How Long Should You Demo Trade Before Going Live?

The honest answer is 60 to 90 days of structured, rule-governed sessions — not "until you're profitable." Those are very different finish lines, and confusing them is one of the most common reasons traders blow their first live or funded account within a month of transitioning.

The wrong answer: 'until you're consistently profitable'

Demo profitability feels like the obvious graduation criteria. It isn't. The problem is that demo P&L is cheap to produce — you can revenge trade, double your size after a loss, move a stop "just this once," and still come out green at the end of the month. The simulated environment doesn't punish bad behaviour the way real capital does. So if your demo profits are built on broken rules, you haven't built an edge. You've built a habit that will destroy you the moment real consequences enter the picture.

There's also a mechanical gap. Demo fills are typically cleaner than live execution, spreads can differ during news events, and slippage on size is essentially absent. A trader running 2-lot XAUUSD in demo might find their real-world fills on the same setup look meaningfully different during an FOMC release. Profitability built on frictionless execution doesn't transfer cleanly.

The right benchmark: rule-following, not P&L

The real question to answer before going live is behavioural: can you follow your trading plan, without exception, across a statistically meaningful sample of trades? That means no revenge entries after a losing run, no oversized positions when conviction feels high, no stops moved further away because you "know" price is coming back. These aren't edge cases — they're the exact moments where most traders self-destruct, and demo is the only safe environment to catch and correct them.

Positive expectancy across your trade sample is the metric that matters most. If you've taken 50 or more trades following your rules with discipline and the math shows a positive expectancy — average winner × win rate exceeds average loser × loss rate — you have something real to work with. P&L is an output. Expectancy is the engine underneath it.

A 60-90 day framework

A structured demo phase should have explicit graduation criteria, not a vague sense of readiness. Here's a practical framework:

• Minimum trade count: At least 50 completed trades on your primary setup. Fewer than that and sample size is doing the heavy lifting, not skill.
• Rule adherence rate: 90% or above across all sessions. Log every deviation — a moved stop, an unplanned entry, a skipped exit — and track it honestly. If you're below 90%, you're not ready.
• Session consistency: 60 to 90 consecutive trading days with no multi-day rule-breaking streaks. One bad day is human. Three in a row is a pattern.
• Positive expectancy: Confirmed across your full sample, not cherry-picked from your best month.
• Drawdown awareness: You've experienced at least one meaningful losing streak within your demo phase and navigated it without abandoning your plan.

When all five boxes are checked, the demo-to-live transition stops being a leap of faith and becomes a logical next step. The 60-90 day window isn't arbitrary — it's long enough to encounter different market conditions (trending, ranging, volatile news-driven sessions) and short enough that you're not using demo as a hiding place from real accountability.

If you're targeting a prop trading challenge rather than a live brokerage account, these same criteria apply — arguably more strictly, because challenge rules like max daily loss limits and trailing drawdowns require the kind of plan discipline that demo is specifically designed to build.

Demo Trading: Pros and Cons at a Glance

Pros

• Free, risk-free environment to learn platform mechanics
• Live market data on most platforms — you see real price action
• Test strategies across any asset class without capital
• Build familiarity with order types, hotkeys, and workflow
• Useful for professional traders testing new setups or platforms

Cons / risks

• Fills and slippage rarely match live execution
• Spreads often better than live, especially during news
• Zero emotional weight — bad habits get reinforced
• Unlimited redos undermine real position sizing discipline
• Demo profitability does not reliably predict live profitability

Frequently Asked Questions