Forex Demo Account - Forex Brokers Offering Demo Accounts

Are you interested in trading, yet discouraged by your lack of experience and knowledge about terms like stop-loss orders, pips, leverage and similar confusing trading jargon? Don’t worry. In our modern era of inventions and discoveries, it is indeed possible to get accustomed to trading basics without risk. Online Forex Trading Broker

Make a loss in every single virtual trade, even blow up your forex practice account, your losses will be imaginary, while the great lessons learnt are real. Many of the best brokers in the market today offer excellent forex demo account packages, and for your convenience we have made a list of them for you here.

Finding the best forex demo account

When first starting out trading forex, or when considering switching to a new forex broker, many traders option to open a forex demo or practice account. Most importantly, this allows them to practice trading using the broker's trading platform to see if they find it sufficiently to their liking. Furthermore, opening such an account also often lets traders try out additional services of the broker providing it.

Keep in mind that finding the best forex demo account for your purposes may require opening more than one demo account to test the most promising forex broker prospects. You can identify forex brokers you might want to test out with a demo account by doing some preliminary research online among the available broker reviews and Internet discussion forums for reputable and reliable forex brokers. To help you in your search, the list above has been compiled to illustrate what features that you might want to look for in a forex demo account.

Trading Platform Access

If your purposes in open a demo account involve checking out the forex broker's trading platform, be sure to ascertain whether opening a demo account will give you access to the real platform. Forex PAMM Fund Management

Also, when it comes to providing trading platform access, most brokers offer two main options. The first is an online trading platform usually accessed via your Internet browser. The second is a client-side trading platform that will generally need to be downloaded and installed on your Windows-based PC. Both options require an Internet connection to provide up-to-date pricing and trade execution in your forex demo account.

Virtual Money

Virtual money is what you will be trading with in your demo account. Since virtual money is free, most brokers will provide you with a rather large amount of it that you can then trade freely until it probably eventually disappears.

Also, if you wish to practice trading more using your demo account, you will probably want to have an account with a larger initial amount of virtual money to play with. Amounts around $100,000 seem to be the norm for virtual money provided with demo accounts.

Practice Trading

Having an opportunity to practice trading using a real forex trading platform and real-time pricing is what demo accounts are all about, especially for newer forex traders. Basically, it really pays to make any mistakes first using a demo account so that you can learn from them relatively painlessly, rather than when you have begun to live trade using a funded portfolio.

Live Trading

Live trading or "going live" is what most aspiring forex traders want to move on to after being successful trading a demo account. This means that you place real funds at risk on each trade, and your portfolio has to take whatever the market offers you in terms of profit or loss. Most traders just starting out in forex will want to see that their trading strategy works well on a demo account before taking the plunge to start live trading.

Dummy Trades

When trading in a demo account, you will generally be taking so-called "dummy trades". Such transactions have no reality in terms of the impact of their profits or losses on your actual trading portfolio, so you can afford to make mistakes with them which you can then learn from.

Margin Trading

Most forex demo accounts allow practice traders to get a sense for what it feels like to trade on margin. This aspect of trading in a demo account can be very educational, since you will probably be margin trading when you start live trading, if you are like most personal forex traders funding their own portfolio. Remember that using leverage increases the risk!

In addition, you will want to manage your margin carefully when trading to avoid having less than necessary to support your open positions. Also, remember to be responsive to any margin calls unless you want your positions to be closed out, which many forex brokers now do automatically when your account's margin becomes insufficient to cover your portfolio's losses according to their stated margin requirements.

Customer Support

Demo traders that require some customer support services to get started either installing the software or trading will want to look for forex brokers that have a good reputation in this regard. The standard for customer support varies widely among brokers, so find one that will best fulfill your needs.

Also be aware that traders newer to either forex trading or using computer trading interfaces might need more support. As a result, they should give customer support a higher priority when deciding which broker to open a forex demo account with for practice trading purposes.

Trading Interface

The trading interface for forex demo accounts should be similar or identical to the actual trading platform you will be using when you go live trading. This will allow you to get intimately familiar with the process you will need to go through to enter orders, manage positions and execute trades.

Many traders prefer a trading interface that can be customized somewhat in terms of its screen colors and window placement. Some traders also like the interface to include a "one-click-trading" feature to make deal execution quicker.

Real Time Rates

The best forex demo account software will display close to real-time exchange rates that change along with the market as it ticks up and down over time. This will give you a good sense of whether or not the trading strategy you intend to employ in live trading, would actually have worked over the time period you are using for demo trading

Naturally, the best type of real time exchange rate is one you can actually deal on using the demo account software. This way, when you go to enter a trade or an order in your demo account using your forex trading platform software, you do not get surprised about where the market really is trading.

Trading Tutorials

Many forex demo account providers also offer useful trading tutorials, either in text or video format, for you to learn from and which compliment the educational service provided by their demo accounts.

These tutorials will usually be provided free of charge. In addition, they can not only help you learn to use the trading platform, but they also often provide helpful information that can help you learn how to improve your trading techniques and develop a profitable trading system.

News Feed Access

Forex trading platforms often provide access to high-quality news feeds from professional forex market information sources that might include Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg or Telerate. You can often use a forex demo account to obtain access to such valuable news wires. Forex White Label Solution

You can also check to see that the news your trading platform provides will be suitable for your needs. This is especially important if you have a strong interest in trading based on fundamental factors.

Information Resources

When you open up a forex demo account, you may also quality to obtain full access to the broker's information resources. These can include informative material like courses, e-books and other tutorials, as well as timely market commentary and economic calendars that can assist you when making trading decisions.

Entering Orders

One of the most useful aspects of opening up a forex demo account is the ability to preview how you will need to go about entering orders in practice. Entering orders correctly and in a timely fashion is one of the keys to successful forex trading.

Furthermore, you will want to take the opportunity provided by demo trading to familiarize yourself with the different types of orders that the broker offers, and how to enter each of them into the market at appropriate times and in various situations.

Dealing Spread Impact

Many people who just back-test their trading strategies over historical exchange rate data, rather than demo trading them, fail to take into account the impact of the dealing spread on the success of their strategy. Then, when they move it to live trading, the difference becomes much more apparent.

Demo trading using real market bid/offer pricing allows you to more clearly assess this dealing spread impact in advance for any trading strategy you might decide to use while you are still within your demo period. This is of course not the only limitation to backtesting; orders might not get filled in a live situation etc. Always keep in mind that past performance doesn't guarantee the future and that hypothetical results are not achievable in a real account.