Choosing a demo account

Often, beginners ask the question "What is the best demo account?", "Where should I open my first forex demo?" The answer may surprise you, but it is: NO MATTER. Demo accounts are free, you do not need to meet any conditions or send anything to open them. There are also no quantitative limits when it comes to setting them up. Some brokers introduce a time limit for the validity of an account to suggest to the trader that it is not very good to sit with virtual capital all the time. This is not good for the broker or the investor.

For broker for obvious reasons - he does not earn commission from demos, and the servers are overloaded and customer service has to look after him anyway. However, for the investor it is bad because learning is slow with virtual cash. He gets used to the fact that he can always set up another account with further fictitious funds and thus he does not train his psyche, which is the most unreliable thing in investments.

So what to do?

At the beginning, it's enough to open a demo in any broker. Since we are just starting, we do not have any definite expectations and we do not know what to expect. Set up a demo, run the platform and try to get to know the mechanisms that operate on the currency market. They are universal, and only the details between the brokers will be different due to the characteristics of the offers.

YOU HAVE TO SEE: Forex brokers. Always up-to-date list of offers

Once you get to know one platform with a given broker, go to another and install the second platform, and then do the same with the third. In this way, you will slowly develop a vision of what you need, what your expectations and preferences are, and what features you should look for in your broker and trading platform.

DEMO account only for testing

Remember that the demo account, as the name suggests, is used to demonstrate what the broker offers, its software and how the currency market looks like. You can get to know the mechanisms and dependencies that occur in this environment and start initial investment learning. However, real education will start on virtual resources, even if it is a small amount, where uncertainty, greed, fear of loss and other emotions that disturb the process of rational decision making will enter the game.

When it comes to the functionality of the demo platform, it is usually identical to the one that is available on the real account. However, there may be slight technical differences in the form of small deviations in the quotations of financial instruments, the speed of order execution or the size of fees in the form of spreads or swap points. When learning, you do not have to worry about it too much, but before setting up a real account, it is worth checking how the broker's offer looks compared to the one that was on the demo.

I already have a real account

Should I check the demo account at all after we already have a real account? Absolutely, I see no reason not to. Using virtual funds, we can check various ideas for new strategies, test transaction systems in different variations, or simply treat them to remind ourselves of how certain mechanisms on the platform work without the risk that we will accidentally open a position on a real account and incur transaction fees.

However, I would recommend that you avoid using one strategy on a demo and real account at the same time. This can ultimately lead to us dealing with all the trades on the former account, and only selective and contradictory life on the latter shows that ultimately the latter will mostly deal with worse deals. If you have already decided to use a given strategy on real measures, then you must have had a solid foundation for it - do not give up on them.