When the practice account is the thing that broke · Nigeria
A demo account is this desk’s working instrument: it produces the same refusals as a funded account, with nothing at stake. It also breaks in ways of its own — and knowing which of its problems are real and which are by design saves a support ticket that never needed writing.
A demo is a full trading account funded with virtual money. It needs an email address and a password, not documents, and nothing on it costs anything. Every refusal listed elsewhere on this site can be reproduced there deliberately, which is the point.
Why a fault desk starts here
Faults are cheap to study and expensive to meet by surprise. On a practice account you can type a decimal in the wrong place, set an exit level too close, let free margin run out, and watch each consequence arrive with its own wording — for the price of an evening. The same evening spent on a funded account has a different invoice.
It will not open, or it will not let you in
The demo does not appear in the account list.
Demo accounts are created inside the Personal Area, alongside funded ones. If the list is empty, none was created yet — the terminal cannot invent one. Create it in the Personal Area and the terminal picks it up on the next sign-in.
The platform refuses the demo credentials.
A demo has its own account number, its own platform password and its own server, and the server is picked from the list rather than typed. Demo and funded accounts sit on different servers, so the right password on the wrong server returns «Invalid account». Message decoder.
The password was never written down.
Platform passwords are managed in the Personal Area, where a new one can be issued for the account. There is nothing to recover inside the terminal itself.
The demo disappeared after a while.
A practice account left completely unused can be archived. That is not a fault and nothing was lost — a new one is created in the same place, in a minute.
The virtual money behaves strangely
The balance went to nothing overnight.
Read the history rather than the balance. A run of positions closed by the account rather than by you means free margin ran out — the identical mechanism a funded account uses, rehearsed for free. Protection that did not protect.
The balance cannot be topped up again.
Some demo accounts are created with a fixed starting amount that is set once. Creating a fresh demo with the amount you want is the ordinary route, and it costs nothing.
A charge appeared on a position nobody touched.
Practice accounts apply the same overnight adjustment as funded ones. That is deliberate: a demo that skipped it would teach the wrong arithmetic. The moving parts.
Orders are refused although the balance is large.
Virtual money is still measured as free margin, and open positions still hold part of it aside. «Not enough money» on a demo means exactly what it means on a funded account.
The demo and the funded account disagree
Different prices. Demo and funded accounts can sit on different servers and can be configured with different account types. Comparing a Standard demo with a Zero funded account is comparing two different products, not finding an inconsistency.
Different fills. A practice account has no queue in front of it. Fills there tend to be tidier than the same order placed with money at stake, and a strategy that depends on tidy fills has not been tested yet.
Different behaviour from you. This is the largest gap and the one no setting fixes. Practice results do not guarantee results on a funded account, because the buttons are identical and the person pressing them is not.
Demo results do not guarantee results on a funded account. Trading is risky and may not be suitable for everyone.
Five faults worth causing on purpose
Each of these takes minutes on a practice account and turns a future emergency into a recognised message.
1. Type a size the instrument does not accept and read «Invalid volume». Then find the size step in the specification and correct it.
2. Put an exit level one point from the price and read the refusal about distance. Then find the minimum distance in the same specification.
3. Open a position, then request a withdrawal on a funded account later — on the demo, simply watch free margin fall and try to place a second order.
4. Leave a position open past the daily changeover and find the adjustment in the history the next morning.
5. Leave a pending order over a weekend and compare where it triggered against the level you set.
What a demo will never show you
- A verification refusal. Practice accounts need no documents, so the whole class of returned-document faults is invisible here. Refused sign-ups.
- A transfer that has not arrived. No real money moves, so the money screens cannot be rehearsed. Money that has not arrived.
- The feeling of a real loss. The only fault a practice account cannot reproduce is the one that makes people press the button twice.
Run the sequence here
The six checks work identically on virtual money, which makes this the training ground.
Open the sequenceA practice account costs nothing and refuses you exactly the same way
Virtual money, no documents at this stage, and the identical wordings when something is wrong. The button opens the official exness.com sign-up through a partner link.
Open a free demo account at Exness