How long to demo trade

I agree, and one of the hardest tasks is to control your emotions so that they do not affect your decision making. I mean let’s face it, most traders will never make it and there is a reason for that.

I can tell the exact time for any trader to spend on demos. Some even don’t like to do trading on demo accounts and they choose micro or cent account for this purpose. So its totally upto an individual’s personal choice.

Trade demo as long as it last, there should be no limit until you are fully satisfied and feel ready to trade with real account. Even if the time limit has elapsed, you can restart again.

Yes demo is the basic thing which helps to learn practical trading even you had a lot of knowledge about forex you can not do trading without practice. You should do demo trading for 6 months before enter to cash account. It will tell you all details of interacting to forex market.

I disagree for the same reasons I have mentioned in this thread.

A demo trading is good in order to be sure of the validity of your strategy - but after about 4 month, and you’re still profitable, you can go live. Though past performances aren’t a guarantee of future profits, it makes sense to conclude that as along as you stick to your trading rules (just as you’ve done on demo), you’ll survive and win.

Seriously, I think one month is enough to trade demo. During this 30 day period, you should also be learning the basics and the demo platform should serve as a practical tool. Actual trading is not done on a demo platform. So, don’t waste too much time on a demo platform. Remember, time is money.

Which is why I have never used a demo account :).

Yes there are many trader that don’t trade in demo account but even there are some veteran that still trade on demos to test or check any new strategy or indicators. Different people different minds.

We can agree on that.

I had stayed on my demo account for 6 months before I started investing to my Hotforex micro-account. Now I’m still using demo account for testing strategies.

don’t think of it as demo trading, think of it as paper trading.

Paper trade until you have a solid trading plan, then you can go real. If your trading plan starts giving you problems, you can always go back to paper trading until your plan is solid. good way to limit your losses when you feel you are having a losing streak. why take your losses on your real account if you start losing your sync with the market?

Demo accounts are a lifelong tool for a trader. :slight_smile: IMO

It would all depend on what your learning capacity takes, and how long you feel you should demo trade. You can’t judge the length of your demo trade with that of others, as it may take long to learn for some persons.

It would all depend on what your learning capacity takes, and how long you feel you should demo trade. You can’t judge the length of your demo trade with that of others, as it may take long to learn for some persons.

I think it depends on your respect for money, and how much money you have.

Demo trade until you get to the point where you’re happy to risk real money.

Risk as much real money as you like until you get to the point where you’re worried about losing it.

If you’re wealthy and have a spare money lying around then you’ll learn 100 times faster (as its emotional) if you deposit money into a real trading account and be willing to count it as a complete loss when you wipe the account.

You should trade on Demo as long as you have developed your winning strategy. What is the point of opening a real account if your Demo is losing?

If you don’t develop a winning strategy, then you can still open a real account, but just for hobby:)

I demo trade for 6 weeks but that was after spending and losing quite a money on real account. It really helped me a lot in improving my trading.

For me, I demo trade for several days only to get used to brokers platform or when I bust my account,
In the end my demo is the real account where I can feel the market and all of emotion which is problematic to traders,
what I found:

  1. Trading is about discipline
  2. Trading about mental control
  3. Its about defending ourselves from margin call

I spent about 3 years on demo, which was what it took to get to the point where I was breaking even most weeks, in retrospect, I probably should have switched sooner.

In my opinion, You Should demo trade only until you fully know your trading platform,
And not a day more,

And ofcourse, you must have a working method, after that you Should open a live micro acount with real money,
The reason for that is because you Cannot go from demo to a winning trader even if you have a method that show Good profit in backtesting and even forward testning on demo acounts, Why is that you may ask? The reason is your ego and psychology,
You do not yet master your self on a psychological level, you might think you do, but believe me, you do NOT,
The only way to learn to master this is screen time on a live acount, a small micro acount is ideal because at the same time you feel the heat of battle, you dont risk much money, you Should be prepared to loose your first acount, the fear and greed Will make you do things that is not in your strategy, such as, exiting winning trades to soon, waiting to exiting loosing trades too long, make entrys too large to get even, and you name it, fear and greed is powerful emotions and it take a long time to conquer Them,
This is something you Cannot experience on a demo acount, and you need to, so there is no reason to spend more time Than neccesary on a demo acount, it is just a waiste of time. There is no fear of loosing papper money, so that is worthless training, the psychology is the hardest part to master and probably Why there is so many loosers in this game, been there, done that, take it from a guy with 5 years of live trading experience, and im still not graduated.