Route — Practice account
The Exness demo account: real prices, virtual funds, and a list of things worth trying on it
A practice account is opened in the Personal Area on the official exness.com, needs no deposit, holds virtual funds and quotes the same market prices as a funded account. That much is quickly said. The harder question is what to actually do with one after the first hour, when the buttons have stopped being unfamiliar and the balance has stopped meaning anything. This page answers that question with a list: the specific manoeuvres that are cheap to get wrong here and expensive to get wrong anywhere else.
Not a mode — an account
A practice account is a separate account, with its own number and its own settings
The word «demo» suggests a switch somewhere, a rehearsal mode that a funded account is temporarily put into. It is nothing of the kind. Creating one produces a new trading account in the account list with a number of its own, a trading password of its own and a platform fixed at the moment of creation, exactly as a funded account is produced. What differs is the money in it, which is not money.
Two consequences follow, and both of them are useful. Because it is an ordinary account, it carries its own leverage setting, and that setting can be moved without touching anything funded — which makes it the one place a ratio can be looked at rather than reasoned about. And because it is an ordinary account, it can be one of several: nothing prevents a practice account for currency work and another one left alone for a longer experiment.
The prices quoted on it are the market's, not a simulation of the market's. A quiet hour is genuinely quiet on a practice account, a news release genuinely widens the gap between the buy and the sell price, and an instrument that has stopped trading for the week has stopped trading on a practice account too.
What creating one asks for
A platform — MT4 or MT5 — a currency and a starting virtual balance, all set on the same short form inside the Personal Area. No deposit is involved at any point, and identity verification is a separate matter belonging to the profile rather than to this account. Where the Personal Area comes from →
What it does not decide
Nothing about a funded account later. Type, currency and platform are chosen again when that one is opened, and a practice run does not commit anybody to repeating them. The five types, side by side →
Trading is risky and may not be suitable for everyone.
The list
Seven manoeuvres worth performing at least once before they matter
Each of these is a thing that reads clearly in a paragraph and behaves surprisingly the first time it is done. None of them takes long, and doing them in a deliberate order — rather than whenever they happen to come up — is the whole value of having an account with nothing at stake in it.
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Send an order at the market, then place one that waits
The first fills immediately at whatever the price is. The second sits until the price reaches a level named in advance, and it may sit there all day and never fill. Watching both behave, side by side on one practice account, settles a distinction that is otherwise learned by accident on the day it matters.
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Attach a protective level to a position, then move it
A level set before the order is sent and a level attached to a position that already exists are typed in different places, and the second is the one people cannot find under pressure. Move it once while nothing is at stake and the route stops needing to be searched for.
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Close part of a position instead of all of it
Reducing a position leaves a smaller one open rather than closing and reopening anything. The remainder keeps its original entry price, and the closed part appears in the history as its own line — which is the detail that makes a statement confusing the first time it is read.
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Trade something that is not a currency pair
Gold, an oil contract, an index or a crypto pair do not move in the same units, do not move at the same speed and do not all trade at the same hours. Opening a small position in one of them is a faster education than reading a specification, and on a practice account the tuition is free.
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Hold something overnight on purpose
Keeping a position past the end of the trading day produces a swap — a charge or a credit for the night, applied per lot and different for a long position and a short one. It is the one cost that never appears while a position is opened and closed inside a day, and the only way to see it is to leave something open.
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Change the volume and watch what the ticket asks for
Doubling the size doubles what the position ties up and doubles what a given move is worth. Typing two volumes into the same ticket and reading the required margin each time turns that sentence into a habit. The arithmetic can be checked outside the ticket first, in the trading calculator.
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Read the history the following day, not the same evening
A record read while the decisions are still fresh is read from memory. Read a day later, the same lines have to speak for themselves — and any note that was worth writing when the order was placed proves its worth exactly here.
The list is deliberately mechanical. Nothing on it is a strategy, and none of it becomes true or false depending on whether the balance went up during the exercise. Trading is risky and may not be suitable for everyone.
Reading the result honestly
What a clean run has established, and what it has left open
Established: the mechanics
That an order of the intended kind, at the intended size, on the intended instrument, can be sent, adjusted and closed without hunting for anything. That is a real result and it is worth having before any money is involved.
Left open: everything about a decision
Whether the trade was a good idea is not a question a practice account has an opinion on. A profitable week on virtual funds is a fact about one week, and the sequence of choices behind it is untested by the absence of consequences.
Left open: the fill itself
Orders on a funded account can complete at a price other than the one on the ticket, and no amount of practice removes that. Delays and slippage may occur. No guarantee of execution speed or precision.
The useful way to hold both halves at once: treat a practice run as an inventory of things that no longer need looking up, and never as evidence about a method. The first list is genuinely shorter after an afternoon of deliberate exercises; the second one is unchanged.
How long one lasts
Practice accounts are not permanent, and replacing one is nothing
Unused practice accounts are subject to the broker's own dormancy rules, which are policy rather than mechanics: the terms in force are the ones published on the official Exness website, because they are exactly the sort of detail a guide gets wrong by quoting it.
Three things worth knowing about the end of one
- An expired practice account is not a loss. Nothing was in it. What disappears is a number, a password and a virtual balance, none of which anybody was relying on.
- A replacement is created in about a minute. The same short form in the Personal Area, no deposit, and a fresh number issued on the spot — after which the new details are the ones typed in wherever the old ones were.
- The exercises above are worth repeating on it. Not because the platform changed, but because a manoeuvre performed once a year is a manoeuvre that will be searched for under pressure. The list is short enough to run through again.
Practice accounts also make a comfortable place to look at an unfamiliar instrument before it is added to anything funded. Whichever platform an account was created for decides which software opens it at all. Fetching the right one →
Quick answers
Questions about practising with virtual funds
Are the prices on a practice account the real ones?
Yes — a practice account quotes the same market prices as a funded one. The virtual part is the balance, not the market: the same spreads widen at the same moments and the same instruments stop trading at the same hours.
Does a practice account become a funded account later?
No, and nothing converts one into the other. A funded account is opened separately in the Personal Area, with identity verification completed before real trading, and the practice one carries on beside it for whatever is being tried next.
Can the virtual balance be topped up or reset?
The controls offered for a practice account sit with it in the Personal Area, and where a balance cannot be adjusted the ordinary answer is to create another practice account instead — it costs nothing and takes a minute.
Does the leverage setting on a practice account affect the funded one?
Not at all. Each trading account carries its own setting, edited in that account's own settings inside the Personal Area, so a ratio can be moved on a practice account purely to see what it does to the margin a ticket asks for. What the setting changes →
Why is there a charge on a position that was simply left open?
That is the swap: a fee or a credit for holding past the end of the trading day, applied per night and set separately for long and short positions. Practising with something held overnight is the only way to meet it before it appears on a funded account.
Can a practice account be opened for both MT4 and MT5?
Each trading account belongs to one platform, chosen when it is created, so covering both means creating one practice account for each. Neither of them knows about the other, and the platform written beside an account in the list is the one that decides what will open it.
Is it worth keeping a practice account once real trading has started?
Usually, yes — as somewhere to look at an unfamiliar instrument, an order type that is rarely used, or a level being placed in an unusual way. The value is not in the balance; it is in having a place where an experiment costs nothing.
The practice account is created behind the same official door
Registration on the official Exness website takes an email address and a short questionnaire; a practice account can be created immediately afterwards, before any deposit, and everything on this page can be worked through on it the same day.
Open Exness AccountThis site hosts no accounts and no sign-in screens of any kind; the button hands over to exness.com along this site's partner route, and everything above happens on the broker's side of that handover. Step-by-step registration is written out in the registration guide.