Trading Habits; From Demo to Live

I am new to babypips, ironically I have never found this site until recently. However I believe this is a great site for beginner guidence. I have been doing demo accounts for over year and a half, and recently have been doing quite well and I haven’t brought myself out of the virtual world of trading and into the live world of real money.
However I guess my question to all beginners/intermediate/professionals; for those who have traded demo accounts and went to live accounts, how much of your trading habits or tatics adjusted because now you are trading live money? :confused:

With me personally I was just more likely to want to exit a trade to soon when profits appeared. You tend to find out just how attached to your money you really are. I was not quite as calm and collected as I was when demoing.

I use a european broker which allows to buy units instead of lots or mini/microlots. So its possible to fine-adjust the risk to very small values. For example, I can buy 50 units of EUR/USD, which means a win/loss of 0.3 eurocents per pip.

After having demoed for a quite long time with a risk of 0.5% per trade, I started live with micro-risk. Precisely: I have a �10.000 account, and I risk �0.5 per trade (thats a risk of 0.005% per trade). With that small risk, the risk to my capital base should be almost negligible, and I stay as calm and focused as I was while demoing. If I had started with 1% risk per trade in the live account, I surely would get very nervous… but in the beginning, a rookie trader should not try to make big money, he should focus on preserving precious capital.

I want to do this for at least 3 months. I protocol every trade, try to observe if there are any differences between live and demo trading (especially slippage), and calculate my R-values and expectancy values regularly. Only when I can accumulate R-values constantly and consistently, I plan to increase the risk slowly. In the long term, when I have gained confidence, I want to converge to a risk of around 0.5% to max. 1% per trade.

I guess everyone’s different, but when I went live I traded with more discipline in terms of sticking to a plan, but with zero discipline in terms of leverage. It [I]nearly [/I] blew my account, but I realised what was happening before it was too late. Luckily!

As my mentor said, if you’re getting sweaty palms, you’re risking too much.

Good luck - you are extremely patient waiting for 1.5 years you know…!

Well the fact is, I have read numerous literature on Forex trading, and there seems to be one constant in Forex Trading, and that is be patient early on. I feel there isn’t much rush, and being that the Forex Market isn’t going anywhere. I have met only a few people through the last year and a half that have tagged alone to trade Forex, however with impatience they have taken the plunge into the live market quite quickly, but to their demise have lost money relatively fast. I accredit it to the lack of learning.

I do appreciate these responses, it definetly helps considering I have not had the experience of going live just yet.

thanks;)

If you want to be successful not one damn thing should change. Whats the point of making decisions in a demo account that you won’t replicate in a real account? Its just a waste of your time at that point.

If you want to be succesful, you start a trading journal and you journal every entry, exit, managment, EVERYTHING. And you adhere to your rule set on EVERY trade. No if, ands, or buts.

NOTHING SHOULD CHANGE.