Forex trading involves development and growth — it’s about increasing your understanding and becoming more confident as a trader. But this can be difficult to achieve without the right software to assist you. You need software that will help you practise making moves — and mistakes — without punishing you. You need a solution that allows you to learn how to trade forex without the added pressure of capital risk.
This is what the demo account of MetaTrader 4 is all about. This demo MT4 account allows you to practise trades and develop practical skills without putting any real money forward. There’s no potential profit, but there’s nothing to lose, either!
What’s the difference between the live account and the MetaTrader demo account? Take a look below.
MetaTrader 4’s live account is the full version of the platform. This is where you’ll put forward portions of your own capital reserves to make trades and open positions in the forex market. You’ll be able to speculate on whether you think your chosen currency pair will increase or decrease in value — open a buying position on pairs you believe will rise and open a selling position on those you think will fall.
When you close your position, success or failure depends on the final market performance of the pair. So, you will take your profit if your predictions are right and absorb your losses if the market goes the other way. This is where the risk factor of the forex market comes into play — profits are never guaranteed during trading, and it takes experience and understanding to develop more reliable strategies. Even traders with this experience may sometimes find that the market doesn’t move as they intended it to.
The demo version of MT4 allows players to build this experience without the risk of losing capital. Working with a reserve of virtual funds — not real capital — you’ll be able to make trades on forex pairs and test your strategy ahead of real-life trades.
Choose from a range of different markets and utilise the intuitive dashboard to analyse the market’s direction. Then, get used to the mechanisms of opening and closing trades. It’s highly recommended that you use the MT4 demo account before getting started in the real market.
Why use MT4 demo accounts? Why not just get straight into trading on the full version of the platform? Well, there are many reasons why a more measured and careful course of incremental growth is better than jumping in at the deep end. A sink-or-swim approach might work for some things, but forex trading is not one of them — the stakes are simply too high in this environment.
Let’s take a look at the advantages of the MetaTrader demo account, exploring all the benefits of using this demo account for MT4 before you step your trading strategy up a gear.
Trading on the forex market can be difficult. Gaining the skills necessary to trade confidently will always take time and experience. Of course, in a fast-paced trading environment like the foreign exchange market, gaining this time and experience is not easy without exposing yourself to considerable risk. This is where the demo account can make all the difference.
You’ll be able to take all the time you need, opening and closing positions and gaining genuine experience in the market. As you build your confidence, you’ll find yourself better equipped to make trades. This, in turn, will prepare you for graduating from the demo MetaTrader 4 account to the full live version. There will still be risks, but you will have the skills required to navigate these risks carefully and deliberately.
One of the best things about the MT4 demo is its comprehensive nature. MetaTrader 4 is an expansive and highly capable platform packed with tools and features that help traders open and keep track of positions while conducting advanced market analysis. This kind of data-driven approach is critical to developing a trading strategy, allowing traders to forecast the future performance of forex pairs. With the MetaTrader 4 demo, you have all this capability at your fingertips.
Tools like stop-loss and take-profit mean you can keep your trade within sustainable parameters. Meanwhile, indicators such as moving averages (MAs) and Relative Strength Indices (RSIs) assist you as you derive even more insight and understanding from the platform. A range of different view configurations is critical as you leverage the MT4 dashboard quickly and without delay. You can rest assured that all of this — and more — are included in the demo version of the MT4 platform, so you can spend time getting to know how you will incorporate all of this into your strategy.
In addition, you’ll be able to work with various add-ons that provide flexibility and personalisation to the MT4 trading experience. These include the alarm manager — a useful feature that enables customised alarms and alerts that keep you informed of the latest movements even outside of the platform, harnessing SMS and email integration. The mini terminal is another useful MT4 feature found on the platform’s demo version. This is where you’ll gain quick, one-click access to various trading functions and data points, streamlining how you use the solution.
The forex market is subject to the forces of supply and demand. When supply increases but demand falls, the currency’s price also falls. When demand increases and supply falls, the price moves in the opposite direction. A wealth of different geopolitical and economic factors will influence this, giving us a highly complex set of market dynamics that traders will need to get to grips with as they develop their future strategies.
In this sense, the demo version of MT4 works just the same way as the live version. When you view the MT4 dashboard, you’ll witness all of these market movements, examining the movements of forex pairs in real-time. You’ll see how prices shift at times of high trading volumes, and you’ll begin to develop the kind of tactics and trading schedule that will become core to your strategy moving forward. Simply put, the MetaTrader 4 demo gives you everything you can expect from the full account without the potential for profit and loss.
Let’s say you have been trading forex for a little while and don’t need further learning or development. Is the demo MT4 account worth it? Yes. If you have an idea for a new strategy, for example, or a new plan of action you want to try out, it’s probably not a good idea to experiment with this on the live account.
Instead, use the demo version. Experiment with different tactics and strategic moves until you are confident that you have developed a coherent and potentially successful plan. Then you can deploy this plan in the live environment — there will still be a risk that the strategy doesn’t work, but you will have given yourself a better chance of success.
For short-term trades in particular, timing is everything. The market can move very quickly, which means a delay of just a few seconds can result in a significant price movement on a scalping trade. You’ll need to get used to executing trades with zero delays and latency.
MetaTrader 4 is certainly well-equipped to achieve this, but you need to get used to making those rapid moves whenever you need to. This is where honing your approach on the demo account of MT4 is so important. Minimise those delays and achieve agile opening and closing before you start trading with real money.
Here at VT Markets, we want to give our users the tools they need to develop their own forex trading strategy. This means offering powerful features that enable traders to open and close positions without delay while gathering the data they need to make their next move.
In addition, we offer the demo version of the MT4 platform, allowing you to grow your skills in a risk-free environment. Set up your demo account and move on to a live account when ready. Want to discover more about trading with VT Markets and MT4? Reach out to our team today.