DEMO ACCOUNT vs LIVE ACCOUNT

Newbee vs Experience :D

I would say, trading a demo accounts too long can in some cases have a negative influence of getting down to the primary, namely trading a live account. The live account do not need to have a large deposit, the most important aspect is that it is 'live' and real money is at stake regardless of the account size. When a strategy is proven profitable after a length of time in demo testing mode, live is the final state of getting the assurance it holds up to the expectations. Even after after some time with trading a 'live' strategy it might gives us proof that it will not be as profitable as we hoped. We do then have the knowledge, that we have to change the strategy or rewrite it entirely, or abandon it. My point is do not wait too long to test a good strategy proven to be profitable in a demo account!

Demo is good to train yourself as a trader can become confident with your system/strategy if you take it seriously.

Serious traders demo trade first... I learnt that lesson late in the game.

I learned practicing on demo for several months, today I have the real account and demo to test new strategies.

My advice to students is this -

Pick a strategy, Trade 100 consistent trades on demo, if its decent, then do 100 on a micro account and build up fro there...
There are plenty of broker that offer a no deposit bonus such as instafx (im not affilated with them but have used them)....
You wont make millions but you WILL get to trade LIVE markets with no outlay of your own...

Just my thinking.

Same here as viktorazul.

I have a copy account with 2 brokers and my own trading account. I tweak strategies on demo's or contests and implement if i like the changes to my own account.

I demoed for a year until confidence and consistency were at a level I was comfortable with.

Sceadagenga

fxdimarion posted:
Serious traders demo trade first... I learnt that lesson late in the game.

Need to ensure the systematic rules are profitable before risking real money. Time is money unless your trading FX,

I don't think so. In real there are many factors that are not in the demo.

bye

adiluccio posted:
I don't think so. In real there are many factors that are not in the demo.

bye

I agree, that there's is possible different beetwen real & demo trading. But only in our head ! If not so, can you name some different
moment in account ?

Slippage is of great concern in a live account. Spikes and other low down methods from brokers is another one. It all depends on what kind of broker we are dealing with. Market Makers do trade against you and will try to hedge against your positions, hoping you will loose. ECN brokers are more commission based and therefore do not trade against you.
It is not all in our heads but emotional pressure will count for a lot of the differences between trading a demo account vs. a live account. Is there a trader who is 100% in control when trading live? No it is not pa possibility and therefore we have to kind of protect our self from being drawn in into this emotional trading pattern. The best cure for this is to have our risk & money management rules defined before we trade. After all we have set the rules our self and the question will arise in real live trading, will we follow our own rules to the letter?

Do recall that even if a broker trades against you, it doesn't mean you will lose. If you owned a company wouldn't you trade against your clients being that 95% of them lose? You hear so much about the broker trading against you, but the fact is them doing so doesn't truly effect you reaching your target or not.

Cholipop posted:
 Do recall that even if a broker trades against you, it doesn't mean you will lose. If you owned a company wouldn't you trade against your clients being that 95% of them lose? You hear so much about the broker trading against you, but the fact is them doing so doesn't truly effect you reaching your target or not.

True. 'All broker & everybody is against me...' is just one of many excuses. If a trader guess, choose or take the trade in right direction no broker can take his profit away.

IztokV posted:

Cholipop posted:
 Do recall that even if a broker trades against you, it doesn't mean you will lose. If you owned a company wouldn't you trade against your clients being that 95% of them lose? You hear so much about the broker trading against you, but the fact is them doing so doesn't truly effect you reaching your target or not.

True. 'All broker & everybody is against me...' is just one of many excuses. If a trader guess, choose or take the trade in right direction no broker can take his profit away.

I agree. Winning in trading usually has very little to do with a broker unless their spreads are volatile and too wide. As long as the prices reflect the representation of the wider market the only thing a trader needs to manage is their strategy, system and mindset. The 95% who lose is a greater social norm, as if you look at most people who work, roughly 90-95% of people are paying more tax than the other 5-10%, 99% of people earn significantly less than the other 1%, etc
It is all a pyramid system. Brokers rely on this 95-5 ratio because it is merely a self fulfilling prophecy. There are only a small number of people who are willing to go to any lengths necessary to be that 5%. Could it grow to 10, 15 or 20%? Yes it could but that would require a mass psychological shift in values and norms and it's never just as simple as that.
However, although statistics don't lie, I believe that anyone can still be that 5% of winners. It can be done.

I have been trading on a demo and now I am about to move to live. I have been pretty succesful on a demo but I have heard that live is different. I have heard that you are likely to lose on a live than demo so that brokers lure you to open live accounts? is it true?

i have running EAs on Demo and live. and they are pretty same. only have some minor slippages.

essenn posted:
From my personal experience, A demo account is an accurate representation of a live account, If a Pro trader or A well designed EA run profitably on a Demo account then it's 99.99 percent certain these resulted can be replicated in a Live account.

Discuss.. 😁

not true if manual trading
true if EA trading

You must have heard of this, but I feel like reiterating.

Personally, I find there is a lot of difference between demo and live account. Psychologically it's not the same at all.

The funny thing is, I turn a 500 euro to nearly 16 000 euros in 5 days, with 1:500 leverage. Once I achieve more 5k and above, my trading style change and I can hold longer.

With a live account, I freak out. I can't read chart anymore, each time I enter a position I only pray that I can at least break even.
When I have a losing position, I try to wait till the market turns to my favor. Well, you know what happen, I close the losing position at high losses.

The stress level is completely different. Actually now I don't know whether is it the demo account that has affected my trading style
or I was just lucky with my demo account.

Perhaps my advice would be, only play demo with the same amount of money you have in your live account.
But here's the thing, when the demo account has increases too much, you kinda feel like they are 'real money'.

Having both demo and live account on my monitor really sucks. Such a contrast lol.

A very good posting of you 'chaviq'. It is hard to say if you did extremely well on your demo trading vs. live but as you say the stress level increases when dealing with real money. More mistakes are made both on entry and exit, we are more careful if the positions goes against us and we want to get out asap before loosing too much money, and sometimes we get out too soon, realizing the market did indeed go our way.
What is the remedy for this? Sticking to our trading plan and follow it in a discipline way so to speak. Even if we loose by sticking to our trading plan we do get invaluable insight by doing so, maybe we do have to reevaluate the plan and create a new one but by sticking to it some great lesson is to be learned for sure.