Choosing a platform

Demo account for day trading: one version is free everywhere, the other costs $600

Two different products go by the name demo account. Brokers give one away to win your business. Prop firms sell the other one as an evaluation, and by their own disclosures it runs on the same simulated plumbing.

Last verified 14 August 2026 · how we check

Search for a demo account and you get two products with one name, sitting at opposite ends of a price range that goes from nothing to several hundred dollars. Sorting out which one you are being offered is most of the decision.

The free kind

Nearly every broker runs a simulated account, and gives it away, because a person who has built a workspace and learned the order ticket is a person likely to fund. Schwab calls its version paperMoney and ships it inside the same platform we looked at in thinkorswim web. Sierra Chart lets you chart and test without connecting to anything, and NinjaTrader leaves simulated trading available on its free plan before an account is funded.

The cost is zero and the catch is ordinary marketing. Nothing about the arrangement is hidden.

The paid kind

A prop firm evaluation is also a simulated account, and the firms say so themselves. FTMO, the largest of them, states on its own site that the accounts it provides are demo accounts with fictitious funds in a simulated environment. Top One Futures states that it holds custody of no investor funds. Clarity Traders describes simulated programmes for evaluating proficiency.

The fee typically runs between $50 and $600 depending on account size, sometimes monthly. We set out what that fee actually buys in funded account trading, and the short version is that it buys a rules test with a payout attached, not capital.

<text x="396" y="106">simulated account</text>
<text x="396" y="126">no real capital at risk</text>
<text x="396" y="146">drawdown rules and a clock</text>
<text x="396" y="166">a real payout if you clear them</text>

The first two lines are identical, by the firms' own disclosures. The price difference is in the bottom two.

The technology is the same on both sides. What the fee buys sits entirely in the last two rows, and it is worth knowing that before paying for practice.

Paying for an evaluation can be a reasonable purchase. Paying for one because you wanted somewhere to practise is not, because the free version practises identically and has no clock running against you.

What the research found inside demo modes

Five researchers audited the demo modes of the 14 most-popular CFD trading apps in the UK, covering 92% of downloads, and published the result in Behavioural Public Policy in March 2025. Two findings are worth carrying into any demo account you open.

31.6% of the risk warnings did not meet the regulator’s standards, and only 35.7% of apps put a risk warning anywhere in the app’s main tabs. The disclosure exists; whether you encounter it while using the product is a separate question, and often the answer is no.

The second finding is about the teaching material. The authors report that educational resources tend to emphasise practice, strategy and psychological mindset, rather than acknowledging how much of the outcome comes down to luck. Their framing is that this puts these products near the border with gambling, in the paper’s words on the

similarities between certain high-risk investments and gambling

That matters for a demo specifically. A simulator that lets you practise until you feel ready is selling the idea that readiness is the binding constraint, and the published outcome data does not support that idea.

The two things no demo reproduces

Your fills. A simulator prices your order against the quote it can see, and rarely models the queue, the partial fill, or the moment when the spread widens and your stop goes through somewhere you did not choose. Profitable demo results at size are the most common place this shows up, because size is exactly where the simplification bites.

Yourself. Every trading decision you make in a demo is made by someone with nothing at stake. That person holds losers calmly, sizes up without flinching, and takes the setup that feels marginal. They are not the person who will be trading the funded account, and the gap between them is the single largest reason demo performance fails to carry over.

How to use one so it tells you something

Trade the demo at the size you will actually fund, not the size the platform hands you. A $100,000 practice balance teaches nothing about a $2,000 account.

Keep the session log you intend to keep later. If you will not do it when nothing is at stake, you will not do it when something is.

Run it long enough to hit a losing streak. The useful information is not whether the strategy works on a good week; it is what you do on the fourth losing day, and a demo is the cheapest place on earth to find that out.

Then, before paying anyone for an evaluation, check the arithmetic on the thing you would be buying. Our page on prop firm pass rates has the only two published numbers in the sector.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We read the Cambridge audit and took its figures from the published abstract, and we read the platform and prop firm disclosures on the firms’ own sites. We have not opened these demo accounts, compared their fill logic, or tested how any of them behave against a live account at the same broker.

Anyone claiming to have measured the gap between demo and live fills should be asked how, and on what sample, because we have not found a firm that publishes it.

Sources

Figures were checked on 14 August 2026 and change over time — confirm current terms with the provider. Nothing here is investment advice; see therisk disclaimer.