What Is a Demo Account? Demo vs Live Explained

A demo account trades simulated money against a broker's price feed. A live account trades real money against real liquidity. The charts look identical, which is exactly why the gap between them is underestimated: what changes is not the price you see but the fill you get, the costs you are charged and the consequence of being wrong.

How it works

A demo server accepts your order and confirms it against the quoted price. There is no counterparty, no position in a book and no capital at risk, so several constraints that shape a live fill simply do not exist.

• No depth, no queue. Demo fills the whole order at the quoted price whatever the size. Live, an order works through available depth and the remainder fills worse, or partially.
• No requotes, no rejections. Demo servers rarely refuse an order. Live servers do, most often in the seconds when the trade mattered most.
• Idealised spread. Demo feeds frequently carry typical rather than instantaneous spread, so the widening around releases and the daily rollover is muted or absent.
• Costs are modelled, not billed. Swap on demo may follow a stale schedule or none at all. Live swap is set per instrument, changes, and is charged triple on the rollover day.
• Unlimited resets. A blown demo is refilled in one click and leaves no mark on the curve. A blown live account is the curve.

Live result = demo result
            - slippage on entries and exits
            - entries that were rejected or requoted away
            - real spread widening and real swap
            - the trades you did not take because it was your money

The last line is not a joke. Position sizing, holding through a drawdown and following the plan are different activities when the money is real.

Why it matters

Every difference above runs the same direction. Demo does not add random noise to a result, it removes friction, and it removes it precisely where friction is expensive: at the entry, at the stop, and at the rollover. A demo track record is therefore an upper bound, not an estimate.

The effect scales with trade frequency and shrinks with target size, the same arithmetic that governs backtesting. On this platform the median trade lasts 2.4 hours — short enough that execution cost is a real share of the outcome, not a rounding error.

None of which makes demo useless. It is the correct place to check that an EA runs, that magic numbers are set and that lot calculations are right. It tests whether the system works. It does not test whether it earns.

What the data shows

Across the public accounts on ShowMyTrades with trading history (August 2026), the median account is up +3.2% time-weighted, with a 9.7% deepest drawdown and a median profit factor of 1.28. 63.0% are positive over time.

Those numbers include live accounts, and they are what real friction looks like at scale. A frictionless version of the same population would read better on every one of them, because none of the costs that produce them are fully charged on a demo server.

The largest of those costs are billed rather than modelled: $4,782,670 in commission and $862,547 in swap across that set. A demo server can display both figures and never has to collect either.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

The point worth making is that this one is not self-declared.

• Every published account page shows a Certifications row in the header. The first badge reads Real Account or Demo Account, and it is derived from the trade mode reported by the broker's server, not from a field the owner fills in. A server whose name contains "demo" resolves to Demo regardless of what else is reported. Hovering the badge explains what the status means for the numbers underneath.
• Beside it sit Track Record and Trading Privileges, marking whether history and ownership have been independently corroborated. Each shows a warning icon when they have not.
• The Info row carries platform, broker with the trade server name in its tooltip, account currency and leverage — the environment the result was produced in.
• The Terminal panel (Terminal & Open Charts on MT5) reports Ping, Retransmission, Terminal build, Memory, Auto trading and DLL imports: the live connection profile behind the fills.

Common misunderstandings

1. "Six months on demo means I'm ready." It means the process works. Neither the fills nor the behaviour under a real drawdown have been tested.
2. "Demo prices are fake." The feed is usually the real one. The simulation is in the fill, not the quote.
3. "A small live account is the same as demo." It is far better, but very small accounts carry their own distortions — minimum lot sizes, cent-account scaling and commission that dwarfs a tiny balance.
4. "A demo record is still a record." It is a record of code that runs. Anyone reading a published result should check the account-type badge first, before the return.

For the patterns that separate a real result from a polished one, read spotting fake EA results.

Related terms