Free demo trading account with $10,000 in virtual money

A demo trading account lets you place trades with virtual money on live charts, so you can learn how the terminal and the product work before risking anything. Every Sky Trade account comes with a demo balance of $10,000, and you can also try trading as a guest without registering. This page explains what the demo shows you honestly, what it can't, and how to use it well.

What the demo is

The demo is a second balance inside your account, filled with $10,000 of virtual money. You trade on it exactly the way you would on the real account: choose an instrument, a stake, an expiry and press Buy (price higher) or Sell (price lower). When the trade expires, the result is applied to the demo balance. Nothing you do there touches real money, and demo funds can't be withdrawn.

You switch between the demo and the real account in the terminal, so it's worth checking which one is active before every session.

Same market, same rules

The demo isn't a simplified simulator. It uses the same server prices as real trading: the same charts, the same market pairs with real quotes, the same OTC generator, the same payout percentages. Trades are opened and closed by the server at the server's price and time in both modes.

That matters for one reason: what you observe on the demo — how quickly a 30-second trade can flip, how often ties happen, how payouts change — is what you'll face on the real account.

It also means the demo shows you the honest arithmetic of fixed payouts. With an 80% payout you win $8 on a $10 stake and lose $10 when wrong, so you need to win about 55.6% of trades just to break even. Run a few hundred demo trades and you'll see that number in action. The profit calculator does the maths for any payout.

Resetting the balance

If you run the demo balance down, or want to start a fresh experiment, press the ↻ button next to the demo balance to reset it to $10,000. A reset isn't possible while demo trades are still open — wait for them to close first.

Guest demo without registration

You can try the terminal as a guest without creating an account. A guest can do one thing: trade — pick an instrument, an amount, an expiry and a direction. Everything else (trade history, the wallet, profile, levels, support) asks you to register. A guest session can't be recovered later and can't receive deposits, so if you want to keep your results, register and use the demo inside your account.

What the demo can't teach you

The prices are real, but the feelings aren't. With virtual money it's easy to take a trade you'd never take with your own money, to "win back" a loss with a bigger stake, or to keep clicking for an hour. On a real account the same situations feel very different: a losing streak hurts, and the urge to recover it quickly is strong.

So the demo is good for:

• learning the terminal, hotkeys, expiry modes and indicators;
• testing whether a set of rules is followable at all;
• seeing payouts, ties and break-even rates with your own eyes.

And it's weak for:

• discipline under pressure;
• knowing how you behave after three losses in a row with real money;
• proving that a strategy will make money — no number of demo trades does that.

Read trading psychology for the part the demo can't simulate.

A practice plan that works

Random clicking on the demo teaches little. A short, structured plan teaches more:

1. Pick one or two instruments and one expiry.
2. Write down your entry rules before you trade, and a fixed stake as a small percentage of the demo balance.
3. Take a set number of trades (for example 50) and log each one.
4. Review: win rate versus the break-even rate for your payout, and how many trades broke your own rules.

The full version is in the demo practice plan, and keeping a trading journal explains what to record.

Switching to real only when ready

There's no shortcut for knowing when you're ready, but there are sensible checks: you follow your own rules on the demo consistently, you understand that payouts below 100% put the odds against random trading, and you've decided in advance how much you can afford to lose. If you switch, start with small stakes — the minimum is $1 — and expect your results to differ from the demo because your decisions will.