A demo account is a flight simulator. Pilots do not use simulators to enjoy crashing — they fly the routes they intend to fly, in the conditions they expect, until the procedures are boring. Most people use trading demos the other way: hundred-lot positions on a million-dollar practice balance, opened for fun and abandoned in a week. The simulator works; it is the protocol that is missing. This sheet is the protocol.
What a demo simulates — and the two things it can't
A demo account runs the real platform against real market prices with a practice balance. Everything mechanical is faithful: quotes, charts, order tickets, stops and targets, margin arithmetic, the costs charged on each trade. For learning to operate the machine — which is most of what a beginner actually needs — the simulation is honest.
Two things are not in the simulation. First, fills: demo orders execute against quoted prices without the slippage and spread-widening that fast live markets produce, so a demo fill is the best case, not the typical case. Second — and far larger — emotion. A demo loss subtracts imaginary money; nothing in your body objects. The documented gap between demo results and live results is mostly this: the platform was simulated faithfully, and the trader was not.
Neither limit makes demo practice optional. A pilot's simulator cannot reproduce a real engine fire either; it still beats discovering the checklist mid-flight. The limits only tell you what demo success can and cannot promise — remember both when you read your own results.
The realistic-demo rules
One setup decision separates useful practice from fantasy, and it happens before the first trade: configure the demo as the account you will actually fund, not the account you wish you had.
- Real balance: set the demo to your genuine intended deposit — $1,000 if it will be $1,000. Most platforms, ours included, let you adjust the practice balance.
- Real sizes: trade the lot sizes that balance supports at sensible risk — likely micro lots, not the demo default.
- Real hours: practise in the sessions you will actually be free to trade, not whenever boredom strikes.
- Real pairs: stay on the one or two majors you intend to learn, and build your watchlist now.
- Real rules: one position at a time, every trade with a stop attached — the habits you want to arrive at live with.
The logic is plain: a hundred-lot trade on a $1,000,000 practice balance rehearses a situation you will never be in. Every decision made at fantasy scale is a decision you have not practised at real scale — the only scale that will ever matter. Configure once, honestly, and the next four weeks of practice compound; configure for fun and they evaporate.
A four-week protocol
Four weeks, one focus per week, every goal a process goal. Profit is not mentioned below, deliberately — at realistic sizes, four weeks of profit is mostly noise either way.
- Week 1 — mechanics. Learn the machine cold: place and close trades, read the quote panel, find your trade history and the swap and margin figures. Goal: zero mis-clicks for a full week — no wrong sizes, no wrong directions, no accidental closes.
- Week 2 — order types. Run every order type deliberately: market, limit, stop entries; stop-loss and take-profit attached on every position; move and cancel pending orders. Goal: pick the order type before each trade and be able to say why.
- Week 3 — sizing. Size every trade from risk: fix risk per trade at 1% of the balance, set the stop first, compute the lot size from it. Goal: every trade in the week sized by calculation, none by feel.
- Week 4 — journal. Add the record: log every trade's reason, size, stop, outcome, and one sentence of review. Goal: a complete journal week and your first self-audit against the previous three.
Four weeks is a floor, not a badge. If week 3's discipline collapsed twice, run it again. The protocol restarts cheaply — that is the entire luxury of practice money, and it is spent best on repetition, not on size.
The demo also keeps a job after graduation, which is worth knowing now: it is where experienced traders rehearse changes — a new pair, a new order type, a rule adjustment — before live money touches them. Treat it as a permanent fixture in your process, not a waiting room you pass through once.
Graduation: process consistency, not profit
The wrong question is “am I up?”. A month of demo profit at a small sample size is luck-shaped; demanding it merely delays some good traders and green-lights some lucky ones. The dangerous version of the wrong question is worse: a strongly green demo month at unrealistic sizes teaches confidence precisely calibrated to a game you will never play. The right question is whether the process held. Move toward live only when, over at least the final two weeks, you can answer yes across the board:
- Every trade was sized from a pre-set risk percentage — no exceptions you have to explain away.
- Every trade had its stop placed before entry, and no stop was widened after.
- Your journal is complete, including the trades you would prefer to forget.
- Your equity curve may wobble, but no single day moved it more than your rules allow.
- You broke none of your own rules even once in the final week — boredom included.
What changes at live
Three things change the day you fund a live account. First, paperwork: regulated brokers must verify identity before you can deposit — the KYC checks are a legal requirement everywhere reputable, and their absence at any broker is a warning, not a convenience. Second, fills: real executions meet real liquidity, so expect occasional slippage and wider spreads around news that demo never showed you. Third — the large one — your pulse. The first live trade at the same size as your demo trades will feel entirely different while being mechanically identical. That feeling is the one variable no simulator ships.
The sensible response is to change one variable at a time: go live at your demo sizes or smaller, keep the same rules, and let the emotional load arrive against a process that is already automatic. Traders who change size, rules, and account type in the same week are running three experiments at once and will not know which one failed.
Real prices, practice balance — set it to your real intended deposit and start week 1.
Two terms, defined once — check them against what you see.