Practise until it is boring.
A demo account is the same platform, the same live prices and the same instruments as a live one, with virtual funds instead of yours. It costs nothing and it never expires. Use it until placing a trade feels routine — and read the second half of this page, which is about what a demo will not prepare you for.
- Virtual funds — nothing of yours is at risk
- The same live prices and the same MetaTrader 5 as a live account
- Every market we offer: forex, stocks, commodities, indices, metals and bonds
- No deposit, no card, no time limit
What to actually do with it
“Practise trading” is not a task. These are.
Learn the platform before you need it
Place a market order, a limit order and a stop. Modify a stop on an open position. Close half a position. Find where the account line shows margin. None of this is difficult, and all of it is difficult for the first time in a moving market with real money on it.
Test one method, not five
Write down what you will trade, when you will enter, where the stop goes and how big the position is. Then take fifty trades that follow it exactly. Fifty trades of one method tells you something; five trades each of ten methods tells you nothing, and that is what most people do.
Trade the balance you will really have
Set the demo to the amount you plan to deposit. A method that works on $50,000 of virtual funds may be untradeable on $1,000 because the position sizes it requires do not exist at that account size. Better to find that out now.
Keep a journal from the first trade
Why you entered, where the stop was, what happened, and what you would do again. It is tedious and it is the single practice that separates traders who improve from traders who repeat. Starting it on a demo means the habit exists before it matters.
What a demo cannot teach you
Most brokers stop at “practise risk-free”. The gap between demo results and live results is where a great many first deposits go, and it is not because the demo lied about prices. Four things:
It cannot teach you what losing feels like
This is the big one. Virtual money does not hurt, so on a demo you hold losers calmly, take the trade you planned, and stick to the stop. With real money, the same drawdown produces an urge to intervene that no amount of practice prepared you for. Traders routinely go from profitable on demo to losing live having changed nothing about their method.
Fills are friendlier than they will be
A demo generally fills you at the price you clicked. Live, in a fast market, it may not — the price moves between the click and the fill. On a strategy with a small edge, the difference between a demo fill and a real one can be the whole edge.
The size is not your size
Demos usually start with $10,000 or more of virtual funds, and people trade them accordingly. If your real account will be $1,000, practising on ten times that teaches habits that will margin-call you in a fortnight. Set the demo balance to what you will actually deposit.
Nothing costs you anything
Swap, spread and financing are simulated, and because the money is not real they never register. On a live account they are a running deduction you feel monthly. A demo strategy that trades often can be quietly unprofitable once real costs apply.
The practical answer to all four is the same, and it is not more demo trading: go live with an amount small enough that losing it changes nothing, and treat those first months as the real practice. A $200 live account teaches more in a week than a $50,000 demo teaches in a year, because the discomfort is the lesson.
Common questions
- How long should I use a demo account?
- Long enough to see your method work in more than one kind of market — usually one to three months, covering at least one quiet stretch and one volatile one. A week of good results in a trending market tells you nothing about what happens when the trend ends.
- Does a demo account expire?
- No. Ours has no time limit and you can keep it after you open a live account — most traders do, and use it to test changes to a strategy without risking anything.
- Are demo prices the same as live prices?
- The prices are the same live feed. Execution is where a demo and a live account differ: a demo does not model slippage or partial fills in fast markets.
- When am I ready to go live?
- When you can state your rules in writing, you have followed them for a full month without exception, and you can point at your journal and say why each trade was taken. Profit on a demo is a weaker signal than consistency on one.
- How much should I start with when I do go live?
- The amount you would be genuinely unbothered to lose entirely. That figure is usually smaller than people expect, and starting there is what makes the first months survivable.
Open a demo, then read while you wait
The platform takes minutes to learn. What takes longer is knowing what you are looking at — start with what moves a market and what a trade costs.