Diskusija

The idea behind the new demo was to prove some things to me and any new traders who might look in on the account.

For roughly 12 months I had traded nothing other than GBPJPY (demo while training myself to master S/R trading) and once I felt I had a good understanding of what I was trying to achieve I then started trading EURUSD in the live account. Obviously EURUSD requires smaller stops, generally, but the principals were exactly the same;

(1) Determine the trend
(2) Spot a trading opportunity
(3) Calculate the place to hide my Stop - somewhere that the Trend had to reverse to take me out
(4) Calculate my position size - using 1-2% risk
(5) Decide on where my likely Target Profit area was
(6) Place the order

Sometimes these are just blind entries, sometimes not. If I place a blind entry I ALWAYS reduce my risk to the smallest lot size I can. As I sometimes place these buy orders (EURUSD) at intermediate Support levels I can expect and I'm ready for price to drop down through that level to find a lower one. As my overall risk on this type of trade is so low I can place another order at the lower level and still be within my 1-2% overall profile.

I always have a clear support level that represents the last line in the sand and if price closes below it I will be ready to close the trade before my stop gets hit.

It is impossible to trade this way on a mini account unless your fund is large enough to accommodate stops of around 250-300 pips and still be able to average in at multiple support levels. A decent size micro account would have the flexibility and an Oanda account would be ideal if your starting fund is small. This lets you trade pennies and gives the breathing space to hold a trade for several days.

So yes, I probably allow myself more flexibility in the demo account but not too much. If you look at the USDCAD trades you will see that there are 6 live trades at present. Each one is only 0.01 and my get-out point on this pair, if all trades failed, would be around 8%. The main fault with these trades is that I should have closed the first 3 at 1.0600 but took my eye off the ball for a couple of days when looking after my grandson. I would have been much stricter if these had been live trades.

Demo can do that to you sometimes, but I do have a long-term short bias on this pair so I'll hold on unless I get stopped out of course. I do honestly try and treat the live and demo accounts with the same degree of care in trading and use the same assessment method when considering a trade. If you flick between the live and the demo account stats you'll see similar holding periods for both - anywhere from hours up to several days.

Hope that helps.