Are you interested in trading, yet discouraged by your lack of experience and knowledge about all the trading instruments, than you should try demo trading. Forex trading is not something where you can just dive into without any experience and preparation. Even when you think that you are ready and prepared it seems it will become real once you send an actual trade to the forex market.
Demo trading can help you discover what type of trading suits you the best, but you should know that no matter how well disciplined you’ll become and no matter how much in profits you’ll make there is no attachment to the money in the account because you didn't have to earn it. When you have no attachment to the money it is easy to take risky moves that you wouldn’t take otherwise.
Your forex broker will give you an opportunity to open a demo account with the exception that the money in the account is not real. Trading forex in a demo account will allow you to place trades like in a real account which will completely simulate the technical aspects of forex trading. Once you have mastered the mechanics you can use the demo platform to experiment with various trade sizes and styles in order to determine your trading personality.
Virtual money is what you will be trading within your demo account. Since virtual money is free, most brokers will provide you with a rather large amount of it that you can then trade freely until it probably eventually disappears. Also, if you wish to practice trading more using your demo account, you will probably want to have an account with a larger initial amount of virtual money to play with. Amounts around $100,000 seem to be the norm for virtual money provided with demo accounts.
Having an opportunity to practice trading using a real forex trading platform and real-time pricing is what demo accounts are all about, especially for newer forex traders. Basically, it really pays to make any mistakes first using a demo account so that you can learn from them relatively painlessly, rather than when you have begun to live trading using a funded portfolio.
