Leverage lets you control a much larger position than the cash you’ve actually put up, and it’s one of the main reasons retail traders can get anywhere near markets like GER40 or gold at all, but it magnifies losses exactly as readily as it magnifies gains. How it works The margin you put up (red) is a small fraction of the full position size you control (teal outline). ...
A demo account is useful, but you need to be aware of its limitations, and knowing the differences between demo and live trading will help you judge when you’re ready to go live. What demo can teach you Watch someone trade demo for a few weeks and you’ll see genuine platform mechanics being learned: how to place an order, set a stop, and use the different order types on the interface you’ll eventually trade on for real. It’s also a reasonable place to test whether a strategy’s logic holds up, because you can see whether the setup you’re looking for shows up with any regularity and whether the rule set makes sense once it’s applied to real charts, not just in your head. Screen time is screen time, and pattern recognition built on demo charts is still real pattern recognition. ...