Greetings all, I am indeed a newbie at this; went through the school, and now 2 weeks into my first demo account. #1 Do brokers “fudge” or “tweak” demo accounts? I just find it hard to believe that at 2am on 6/5 I was neg.$8000.00 on my GBP/USD lots and miraculously sold at 8:33am for a profit of $21.00 each! (checked the charts-didn’t see THAT much of a rise!) #2 The broker I have the demo with shuts down from Fri at 5 to Sun at 5, are most brokers like this? Do you have to open another account to be able to trade24/7?
Ok. Not entirely sure what you’re describing but at 2am Sydney opens with Tokyo opening an hour or so later. So there is lots of movement going on then…especially with a JPY cross currency.
Forex is a truly 24/7 market but technically should only be considered a 24/5 because no one really trades over the weekend. As liquidity goes down the amount of volatility goes down too.
Also, because of this decreased liquidity brokers really raise their spreads. Oanda for example, keeps most of the majors at 10pip spreads.
Honestly, from Friday mid-day to monday are not good times to trade. You can get some good ones in on sunday nights…but that’s not the norm.
As for demos…most broker’s demo accounts operate the same as live accounts. About the only difference you might see is a bit of slippage in live because demo’s don’t actually contact the main server (I think) to place demo trades.
if anything demo accounts give you false results because of there lack of slippage. demos don’t suffer this and it is unreasonable to expect a live account to not have any slippage.
most banks don’t operate on the weekends and therefore the forex market is at a crawl with no liquidity and therefore brokers dont offer trading on friday evening to sunday evening.
Thanks for your explanations, I was unaware of the slow/no weekend trading- (newbie). Yeah, I figured there would be some differences between demo/live accounts. This forum is very helpful! Thanks for sharing your time and knowledge!
scatristan. I’m also a ‘newbie’
I also have just completed the excellent Babypips School and all the info you need about market hours, and more importantly, when the best times to trade, are in the “12th Grade” section. You may want to also review the 13th Grade section on MM. Good luck.
every broker shuts down for the weekend…its only 24/7 from monday NZ open monday and america close friday.
the price on any pair may gap up or down over the weekend
Mmm you should be aware of too slippage on demos since those accounts are usually the ones that work better because the brokers want to convince you to stay with them� try another demo before going live