Forex demo account is one of the best
learning, practicing, educational,
informational and even entertaining tools
that every Forex newbie can use for his
advantage. Sometimes, beginning currency
traders underestimate the usefulness (and
I would say, the necessity) of the demo
account trading. Demo account can be
opened with almost any Forex broker and
in 99.9% of cases it’s completely free.
On the demo account one can trade Forex
with the virtual money, doing exactly the
same things that he’d do on the real
account but without risking any real
money.
The advantages of
the Forex demo accounts are
tremendous:
1. It’s free — you don’t
have to deposit anything or pay any fees
to open the demon account with the vast
majority of the Forex brokers. And in the
case when you don’t know whether the
Forex trading is a right thing for you at
all, “free” is the synonymous for
”great”!
2. Practice trading —
with your free Forex demo account you can
practice your trading skills, develop new
strategies and learn new things about
currency trading. That’s possible because
all currency pairs behave equally on demo
and real accounts. The only difference is
the virtual vs. real money.
3. Get to know the
broker’s platform — with demo account you
have the access to the Forex broker’s
trading platform, which you can test
before moving on to the real account. And
this can be very useful, especially with
the exotic trading platforms.
4. Free charting tool —
even if you don’t plan to trade with the
specific Forex broker, you can always use
its demo account to have a free access to
their trading platform’s charting tools.
That can be very useful when your real
account is set at the broker with a
not-so-good platform.
Those are the advantages of the Forex
demo accounts. Of course, it’s necessary
to say something about the caveats, but
the biggest thing about the demo accounts
is that they are free, so, we can always
close our eyes on their disadvantages
without any damage to our purses.
1. Execution may differ
— unfortunately, Forex brokers usually
have an ideal execution (no slippage, no
reqoutes and no market delays) for the
demo accounts and a real execution (with
some of the mentioned unpleasant things)
fore the real money accounts. You should
understand this when moving from demo to
real.
2. Some demo accounts
expire — some Forex brokers make demo
accounts expire after 30 days. Of course,
you can always open a new demo account,
but all your stats and positions will be
lost. Just try to find a broker with
non-expiration demo accounts.
3. Emotions are
different — the psychology of Forex
trading is very complex. When you trade
on demo account using the virtual money
the loss won’t frustrate you much and the
wins won’t get your heart beating like
crazy. On the real Forex accounts
emotions play a huge role. You should
keep in mind that you’ll have to adapt
your trading psychology from demo to real
at one point.