Virtual trading before actual one - pros and cons

[KnightElite]

What must be remembered is that practicing trading using virtual trading does not guarantee that we will immediately
succeed when doing real life trading. But in my opinion the percentage of success of people using virtual trading is
greater than people who jump right in do real life trading. So I am one of those who support virtual trading.

Yeah it is true but still paper trading is important in order to get familiarize on what is going on in the cryptocurrency market. Actually, the people who are doing trading simulator or paper trading first are the people who have lessen mistakes in their real portfolio. The only cons that I only seeing in paper trading is the emotion where it is not real especially if your money is not involved. Actually, in real life trading; understanding our own emotions are very important because it plays vital role in making decisions that can help us to succeed in trading.

Do not quickly open trading account if you do not yet try a paper trading, it is not required but paper trading can change your trading journey. Maybe it can help you in order for you to master your skills and the strategies wherein you can use in your rea portfolio in order to make gains.

[Ucy]

Ofcourse.
Sometimes I think some sort of real rewards (maybe inform points, rankings, etc) on the "virtual trading" or demo could encourage people to stick to learning, and help them learn almost like they would on the real ones. The rewards should be useful afterwards, and not something that is useless to you after earning them.

In my country, it is advisable to use virtual trading first before risking the total investments, it is mainly in stocks market, sometimes it only focus on the familiarization of the brokers feature and possible price of the companies they wanted to buy. Those who really have zero knowledge in trading should be thankful that virtual tradings are available to be able to earn. I used it when I start in stock market but no in crypto since it's almost the same in use the difference is the companies and volatility is more in crypto. Those who are truly serious to learn and wants to avoid risk should use it.

I guess making it somewhat mandatory for people to learn with demo before trading the real stock could be an interesting way to incentivize newbie traders... Am not sure everyone will like this though.   You can be required to pass your demo trading before you are allowed to go beyond trading what you can afford to lose in real trading.
People could still be allowed to trade with real funds without going through demo (only with what they can afford to lose), until they learn how to trade, then graduate a bit to trading with higher amount.

[abel1337]

Ofcourse.
Sometimes I think some sort of real rewards (maybe inform points, rankings, etc) on the "virtual trading" or demo could encourage people to stick to learning, and help them learn almost like they would on the real ones. The rewards should be useful afterwards, and not something that is useless to you after earning them.

In my country, it is advisable to use virtual trading first before risking the total investments, it is mainly in stocks market, sometimes it only focus on the familiarization of the brokers feature and possible price of the companies they wanted to buy. Those who really have zero knowledge in trading should be thankful that virtual tradings are available to be able to earn. I used it when I start in stock market but no in crypto since it's almost the same in use the difference is the companies and volatility is more in crypto. Those who are truly serious to learn and wants to avoid risk should use it.

I guess making it somewhat mandatory for people to learn with demo before trading the real stock could be an interesting way to incentivize newbie traders... Am not sure everyone will like this though.   You can be required to pass your demo trading before you are allowed to go beyond trading what you can afford to lose in real trading.
People could still be allowed to trade with real funds without going through demo (only with what they can afford to lose), until they learn how to trade, then graduate a bit to trading with higher amount.

Making a mandatory demo before the real trading sounds good in the part of newbies but it can be bad from the company knowing that there are some traders just want to try or switch to other platform and this mandatory demo can be the hindrance to them because they know what to do and this can be bad for the company since they can possibly be avoided by traders. Making the demo an option will be more efficient.

I'm sure that people who want to try trading would make a research first before dealing with money, No one wants to lose a money right? So it is a common sense that aspiring trader would learn how to trade first and learn the fundamentals of it, It would be nice if platforms make a somekind of practice range for aspiring users.

[GeorgeJohn]

When ever i hear virtual money I get confused, please what did op mean by virtual money?
It's obvious that virtual exist,but what we are considering in this topics here is trading, to trade require money to purchase the necessary cryptoccurrency needed for the trading such bitcoin, litecoin, etherum
If you don't have a specific  amount of money for trading,do not adventure into it because the lost might lead human to other pathway of life.
Because of the level of risk I find in it.

[beerlover]

When you are doing virtual trading it depends on how you do that as well, if you are just doing it randomly and happen to hit few lucky trades and make a profit and move to the real one, you will be upset with losing a ton of money and thinking "why did I made so much profit in virtual one and lost in the real one", well the answer would be you were lucky in the virtual and you saw the reality in the actual one.

However if you really give throughout thought on each of your trades even on the virtual one and you actually study why you made a profit or why you made a loss and learn from them, that means you could potentially do the real one very well as well, that is why I believe virtual before actual is depending on how you end up using the virtual one.

[mersal]

I see a lot of advice where people suggest each other to practice on websites where they can trade with virtual money. To be fair, I am in this list too among them but at the same time no one warns such people that it was it's pros and cons, more likely cons are outsiders while giving advices.

Pros: You trade with virtual money where your actions can't raise/damage your real budget, it looks like you spend money like nothing. This gives us possibility to test our skills and abilities in trading and help us further why we make mistakes and what we need to fix while considering the fact that the reason why I profit/lose is because you lose/profit.

Yeah, it sounds good but sometimes when we move on real life trading, things go wrong. We are always warned to leave our emotions outside while we are trading that includes: Not to panic sell, hold when there are harsh moments, etc. But we forget to mention another main emotion that we face in this situation: We trade with our money where we are responsible to results and these results may have huge impact on our life. Inside, in our subconscious, we worry about the results because we trade with our, real money.

To my mind that's one of the main reason why people usually start well with virtual trading and end up badly in real life trading and somehow this is one of the most skipped problem in overall.

Virtual or demo trading is just only for complete beginner not for mastering in crypto trading completely, demo account offers people to test their skills but the real ability of using their skills can be found only with their real money involved and more people losing means they are just taking it too easy.It is important to start from the scratch not with all the saving you had!

[Arkann]

~~

Virtual or demo trading is just only for complete beginner not for mastering in crypto trading completely, demo account offers people to test their skills but the real ability of using their skills can be found only with their real money involved and more people losing means they are just taking it too easy.It is important to start from the scratch not with all the saving you had!

It is undeniably best for a beginner to use virtual trading to gain experience and relevant skills that will be very useful later on. But it seems to me that even an experienced trader will be able to use demo versions of a cryptocurrency exchange in order to work out their options for trading strategies to study their effectiveness.

[wxa7115]

I would be against virtual/demo trading. I would just use them to get to know the features of the platform and get used to it. I would be relying on it to "learn how to trade".
Those are demo accounts and you know that. Hence, you even know that there isn't any risk of losing your money. So the trades you will be making won't matter to you.
But if you trade with real money/coins, trust me, you will be trading totally differently since this time "you will care about your coins". Again, you might build up some bad habits when trading in demo accounts.
I would rather start trading with small funds to gain real experience.

I have my doubts that even trading with a small amount of money is that beneficial because then we go back to square one to the problem of trading with a virtual trading account in which you are not going to care about your losses, it is obvious that trading with a small amount of money is better than trading with virtual money but if the amount of money is still small then even if you lose you're not going to be that affected by it.

It is only when you trade with enough capital that makes you feel nervous about losing it when you can truly experience what is trading for real and that means that one single mistake could be enough to destroy your account, then my opinion is that the most important skill to learn is how to manage your risk and limit your losses.

[gentlemand]

I think it can be handy to familiarise yourself with the pure mechanics of trading. Beyond that in trading you live and die on the mastery of your own emotions and if there's no actual money on the line then virtual trading won't scratch the surface there.

I'd do virtual first just to make sure I wasn't making any obvious mistakes in executing trades. Then I'd switch to very, very modest amounts to see what happened.

I have my doubts that even trading with a small amount of money is that beneficial because then we go back to square one to the problem of trading with a virtual trading account in which you are not going to care about your losses, it is obvious that trading with a small amount of money is better than trading with virtual money but if the amount of money is still small then even if you lose you're not going to be that affected by it.

It is only when you trade with enough capital that makes you feel nervous about losing it when you can truly experience what is trading for real and that means that one single mistake could be enough to destroy your account, then my opinion is that the most important skill to learn is how to manage your risk and limit your losses.

Your small amount may turn into a large amount and then you get that experience for very little risk. Anyone diving straight in cold is likely to end up crippling themselves before they got started.

[mersal]

~~

Virtual or demo trading is just only for complete beginner not for mastering in crypto trading completely, demo account offers people to test their skills but the real ability of using their skills can be found only with their real money involved and more people losing means they are just taking it too easy.It is important to start from the scratch not with all the saving you had!

It is undeniably best for a beginner to use virtual trading to gain experience and relevant skills that will be very useful later on. But it seems to me that even an experienced trader will be able to use demo versions of a cryptocurrency exchange in order to work out their options for trading strategies to study their effectiveness.

For someone who already have experience in trading doesn't necessarily go to demo account because literally they are wasting their profits making opportunities so they should try their strategies with little money to make it more realistic.

[suzanne5223]

I would be against virtual/demo trading. I would just use them to get to know the features of the platform and get used to it. I would be relying on it to "learn how to trade".
Those are demo accounts and you know that. Hence, you even know that there isn't any risk of losing your money. So the trades you will be making won't matter to you.
But if you trade with real money/coins, trust me, you will be trading totally differently since this time "you will care about your coins". Again, you might build up some bad habits when trading in demo accounts.
I would rather start trading with small funds to gain real experience.

I have my doubts that even trading with a small amount of money is that beneficial because then we go back to square one to the problem of trading with a virtual trading account in which you are not going to care about your losses, it is obvious that trading with a small amount of money is better than trading with virtual money but if the amount of money is still small then even if you lose you're not going to be that affected by it.

You seems not to understand the benefit of virtual trading for it way for new exchange user to learn about the importance of some tools on the exchange trading platform and it also a means for newbie trader to try out all what he has learn through article and video. So, i dont see what make trading with small amount better than virtual money trading if even the traders is not on budget.

[Latviand]

Yeah, it sounds good but sometimes when we move on real life trading, things go wrong. We are always warned to leave our emotions outside while we are trading.

Things can go wrong because of emotion, yes. The difference there is that when trading a life account, you consider that you are trading your life money and most times you seem to panic to go for an order that will give the profit but enter a losing trade. Lice account can be problematic because any mistake is loss of profit.

The reason why you are not confident in trading in real life because you are scared about the risks.

Trading with real money can cause nervousness and fear and you lose focus when you perform a trade. While in a virtual trading, you are confident that you will lose nothing, you will only lose virtual money that is not yours. Sometimes, it is much better to practice in an actual trading so that you will know how it works and you will have an idea about what are the feelings that you might experience in the middle of the transactions.

Virtual trading are practice, but for me it is efficient to practice in real life so that you will also gain experience.

[Strongkored]

Virtual trading or Demo Accounts are very useful to lift our trading skill but not our metal as traders. When you start trading with real money, that's where our mentality is tested, it's not easy to be consistent with profit targets as well as loss limits that we can bear.

[Krislaw]

Pros: You trade with virtual money where your actions can't raise/damage your real budget, it looks like you spend money like nothing. This gives us possibility to test our skills and abilities in trading and help us further why we make mistakes and what we need to fix while considering the fact that the reason why I profit/lose is because you lose/profit.

For me the pros is that It's good to use when you want to know and learn a proper strategy that you will use in trading the coin, you can also know how to set a proper entry and stop loss when you need to trade. but you need to think that it's your real money because that where the cons comes in trading using demo money you won't even realize and just spend the money you won't experience the feeling of a loss.

That's why it's also good starting knowing the basics then start with real trading but using a small amount of money so you can realize the risk and experience having a loss or a gain.

[el kaka22]

Demo ones are really doing a big change, I do hope that people would finally get back on the proper virtual trading, demo ones are not really making any change in your trading ability because most of them are actually based on another whole new market with people who use the demo market, that is what demo means, so in real trading bitcoin could be $20k while demo one could be $10k, there is really nothing that makes them work together.

On the other hand virtual is not like that, you buy and sell however you want and the virtual prices change with the real prices so you know if you had certain amount of money in real trading you would earn or lose that much money if you did those moves. I do not really care about the demo one, I prefer the virtual one because it is better.

[justdimin]

I guess this topic has been a bit of a real head scratcher because in the same span of few hours there has been two topics about it. I mean this is actually not a new thing, practice trading has been around for over 10 years in the regular stock market and in crypto it has been around at least 4 years I know of, I don't know if it has been around even longer. So, why did people suddenly get interested in this? Not like it is a brand new thing that we should be excited about.

Anyway I hope that people would actually find an answer because I feel like I know my answer but maybe different people have different approaches? Some people may think of it one way and some people may think of it another way, I can't really say which one is correct, maybe even the results do change like that.

[Anonylz]

The virtual account for trading is always a good option, this is where you test your ability as a trader and see how you will fare, trading is a serious thing because if not taken care you can easily loss money, the reason why virtual trading account is very important to learn with from the beginning unlike actual account where you can easily lose money for real because of limited knowledge.

[rexxarofmoknathal]

I see a lot of advice where people suggest each other to practice on websites where they can trade with virtual money. To be fair, I am in this list too among them but at the same time no one warns such people that it was it's pros and cons, more likely cons are outsiders while giving advices.

Pros: You trade with virtual money where your actions can't raise/damage your real budget, it looks like you spend money like nothing. This gives us possibility to test our skills and abilities in trading and help us further why we make mistakes and what we need to fix while considering the fact that the reason why I profit/lose is because you lose/profit.

Yeah, it sounds good but sometimes when we move on real life trading, things go wrong. We are always warned to leave our emotions outside while we are trading that includes: Not to panic sell, hold when there are harsh moments, etc. But we forget to mention another main emotion that we face in this situation: We trade with our money where we are responsible to results and these results may have huge impact on our life. Inside, in our subconscious, we worry about the results because we trade with our, real money.

To my mind that's one of the main reason why people usually start well with virtual trading and end up badly in real life trading and somehow this is one of the most skipped problem in overall.

Virtual trading training is of help to some extend, specially to the person who never did any training.

However, for any real strategy development and understanding of the real market movements there's no way around it.

You have to play with real money and learn the invaluable lessons by losing some of that money, at first. So I do agree with you that virtual trading is only for fun but it doesn't really bring real value to your winnings.

[iv4n]

We had a similar topic in gambling discussion section, it was about gambling with free money or demo versions, or gambling with the real money! My stand is pretty clear on that, it's always better to do it with real money! Demo version is good for one thing only, to learn about the rules if you are complete newbies, but as soon as you learn the rules try with real money, with amount you can afford to lose of course. Why it's better, simply because you learn how to do it under the pressure! You don't have pressure while you do it for free, you can risk a lot, you don't care much about your amount, but with real money you are under the light and you know you need to give your best or you will fail and lose money, and you don't wish that to happen!

[milewilda]

We had a similar topic in gambling discussion section, it was about gambling with free money or demo versions, or gambling with the real money! My stand is pretty clear on that, it's always better to do it with real money! Demo version is good for one thing only, to learn about the rules if you are complete newbies, but as soon as you learn the rules try with real money, with amount you can afford to lose of course. Why it's better, simply because you learn how to do it under the pressure! You don't have pressure while you do it for free, you can risk a lot, you don't care much about your amount, but with real money you are under the light and you know you need to give your best or you will fail and lose money, and you don't wish that to happen!

You would really feel the thrill or excitement because you arent risking something and as said or mentioned which you would bet as much as you can because you do know that its just free or virtual money.
You know that you wont lose anything thats why learning wont really be that much compared when you are dealing with the real thing.Pros is that you can really make out a learning yet you can able to
know on what are the mechanics or how do things should be done or does work rather than getting live or using actual money on your first try thats why getting some demo wont really be that a bad idea
but real learning can really be found on the actual situation using actual or real money.