A demo account is a simulator, not a plan

A demo account is a simulator wearing the costume of a dealing platform. The buttons often match the live platform: a quote, an order ticket, a volume field, a margin window, a statement. The money does not match. The balance was granted by the firm so that clicks would have something to change, and on most demos it can be reset when the game becomes unpleasant or when you want a fresh number. Nothing is withdrawn to pay a bill, and nothing is deposited from wages. That single difference rearranges the meaning of every other number on the screen. A loss on a demo is a change in a granted balance. A loss on a live account is a change in cash. Practice at the first can teach the location of the buttons. It does not teach what you will do when the second is the money you had planned to keep.

The simulator is also an imperfect copy of the firm's own live dealing, and the imperfections are easy to miss because the costume is good. Demo quotes may be the live stream, a delayed stream, or a stream that never widens the way the live book widens when news arrives. Fills may occur at the displayed price every time, with none of the slippage a live market order meets when the price is moving. Rejections and requotes may be rare, because there is no real inventory to protect. Swap may be switched off, set to a flat teaching value, or applied on a schedule that the live account does not use. Stop-outs may be gentle or absent. A demo that never shows a wide spread will train you to ignore a cost that a live ticket itemizes on the first volatile morning. If you use a demo for anything beyond learning the menu, export its statement and read it with the same suspicion you would bring to a live one. Then ask the firm, in the contract or the account description, which of these behaviors are shared with the live book and which exist only in the simulator. The answer belongs in your notes. A rising demo balance does not contain that answer.

Resetting the balance is the feature that makes a demo a demo, and it is the feature that destroys it as evidence. A live account cannot be set back to 10,000 after a bad week except by a new deposit, which is a new fact, visible on the statement, and not a erasure of the old one. A demo reset throws away the path. People reset after a loss and keep the memory of the earlier wins, or they reset so often that no sample ever includes a dull month. The curve they then describe is a selection of the stretches they allowed to continue. A record of a demo, if you insist on keeping one, has to include the resets: the date, the balance before, the balance after, and the reason you typed into the form. Without that log, the ending balance is a number the reset button edited. You would not accept a bank statement that omitted the days you disliked. A demo history with the bad stretches deleted is that kind of document, even when the platform itself is functioning exactly as designed.

There is a second, quieter gap. On a demo, the size of the position has no weight, so the habits you practice are often the habits of a person playing with a number that cannot hurt. It is common to trade a larger lot on a demo than one would ever post cash behind, and then to treat the resulting profit as proof that the larger lot "works." The lot did not work. The simulator marked a price difference times a size you chose because the size was free. The same price difference on a live account, at that size, would move real equity by the same arithmetic, and the margin rules you actually sign would apply. Practicing a size you do not intend to use teaches the buttons for that size and teaches a false sense of what a pip is worth in your life. If the purpose of the demo is rehearsal, the volume on the ticket should be the volume you would be willing to see on a live statement, and the granted balance should be in the neighborhood of the cash you would actually deposit. Even then, the rehearsal leaves out the part where the cash is gone. Similarity of size is not similarity of consequence.

A plan, if the word is going to mean anything, is a written constraint that can be checked against a statement after the fact. It would say, in language precise enough to audit, how size is computed from the contract, what maximum loss of cash is being accepted, what counts as a deposit you can afford to lose entirely, and how the record will be kept. Those are blanks a person fills with their own figures, from their own finances, at a firm of their own choosing. This page does not fill the blanks. A number supplied here would be advice dressed as an example, and a pair named here would be a recommendation dressed as a lesson. The useful observation is drier. A demo balance is not those blanks. It does not state a maximum. It does not state a position size tied to money you possess. It does not produce a statement at a firm that can refuse a withdrawal, issue a margin call, or send a tax document. Calling the demo a plan confuses a simulator's score with a set of constraints. The score can be high while no constraint has ever been written down.

People promote the score because it is the only object the demo reliably produces. After a few weeks of clicks the balance is higher, and the rise feels like information about the future. It is information about that simulator, in that period, at that size, with those fills. It is a sample of one path. Currency prices do not owe the next path a resemblance to the last one, and a demo path is not even a clean sample of live fills. A journal of demo tickets can still be worth keeping for a narrow purpose: to practice the reconciliation described for live statements. Can you retell a row. Does the profit match price change times units. Did you record the reset. That practice builds a clerical skill. The skill transfers. The profit figure does not transfer with it. Walking into a live account because the demo ended in profit is a change of contract, not a continuation of the same activity. The new contract involves a deposit, a margin rule, and a price that can consume the deposit. None of those were fully present in the rehearsal, even if the chart on the wall looked the same.

The moment of funding is worth describing without romance. You complete the firm's account opening, you read a risk disclosure that says you can lose the money, and you send cash. From that send onward, the statement's deposit column has a real row, and every later ticket edits a balance that the reset button will not restore. The quote may look identical to yesterday's demo quote. The spread may not. The fill on the first live order may differ from the fill the demo gave you for the same click, particularly if you choose a moment when the price is moving. Swap will start to accumulate on the live schedule. A loss that you would have reset will instead sit in the closed-trades table until you understand it or until you stop looking. This is the ordinary beginning of a live history. It does not require a mistake by the firm. It requires only that simulated money and posted money are different substances. Treating the first live weeks as a demo that happens to be funded is how small rehearsals become large cash losses at a size the simulator had made to feel normal.

You can use a demo for the things it actually is. Learn where the statement export lives. Learn which field is volume and which is margin. Place an order, close it, and reconcile the row until the arithmetic is dull. Watch a session open and see the spread change, if this particular demo allows the spread to change. Write down what the simulator refused to simulate. That list, "no slippage observed, swap not charged, balance reset on Thursday," is a more honest product of a demo month than the ending balance. When you later read a live statement, you will already know the shape of the table, and you will know which lines the demo never taught you to expect. The ending balance of the demo can be discarded, or kept next to the reset log as a curiosity. It should not be carried into the live account as a target, a proof, or a plan. Targets of that kind are how a granted number starts giving orders to real cash.

None of this is an argument that rehearsal is useless, and it is not an argument for funding an account. It is a distinction between two documents. A demo statement, saved with its resets noted, is a worksheet from a simulator. A live statement is a record of cash at a firm that can lose it for you in the course of pricing a pair. Skills of reading can move from the worksheet to the record. Results should not be asked to move with them. If you never fund an account, the worksheet remains a way to see how tickets are printed, which is a complete use of it. If you do fund an account, the plan, such as it is, will be the constraints you wrote and the statements you keep, tested against each other after the fact. The demo's last balance will not be a member of that pair of documents.

This site is not a broker. It does not offer a demo, a live book, or an account you can fund, and it does not convert a rehearsal into permission to send money. A demo balance, wherever it is hosted, can be reset because it was never a deposit. Currency prices on a live account can wipe a deposit that was real, including a deposit posted by someone who had just watched a simulator print a gain. The screen can look the same. The statement, afterward, will show the difference in a way that does not reset.

This page is general information. It is not a policy, a diagnosis, a school place, or a trade.