Practising Fixed-Time Trades on the Demo

The Fixed-Time Mode

Fixed-time trades work on a preset clock: you commit an amount, choose a direction, and the outcome is settled automatically at expiry against the price you entered at.

Fixed-time trading is the easiest product on the platform to describe and one of the easiest to misuse. You pick an asset, you pick how much of your balance to commit, you pick a moment in the future, and you state whether the price will be above or below its current level when that moment arrives. Once the trade is open, nothing about it is negotiable. That closed structure is exactly why the demo is the right place to meet it for the first time.

Set expiry and amount

Two inputs define the trade before anything else happens. The amount is the slice of your balance you are committing, and on a fixed-time trade that slice is fully at stake. The expiry is the moment the platform compares the closing price against your entry. Both are chosen deliberately, in the order panel, and both are locked the instant you confirm.

• Amount: the stake you are putting behind the direction you chose. On the demo this comes out of virtual funds, so the number on screen is a rehearsal, not a loss.
• Expiry: the countdown length. Shorter expiries turn the chart into noise; longer ones give a move room to develop.
• Direction: up or down relative to the entry level, and nothing in between.

Up-or-down outcome

The result is binary. Either the closing comparison goes your way or it does not, and the size of the move barely matters. A price that finishes a fraction above your entry settles the same as one that finishes far above it. Traders coming from shares or funds usually find this the strangest part, because there is no partial win, no trimming a position, and no letting a good move keep running.

Time-limited trades

Every fixed-time trade carries its own deadline, which is why the mode is described as high-risk and short-dated. You are not only right or wrong about direction, you are right or wrong about direction within a fixed window. A view that turns out correct twenty seconds after expiry still settles against you. Practising on virtual funds is the cheapest way to feel how much that deadline changes the decision.

Understanding the three locked inputs before you place anything is the whole beginner curriculum for this mode, so ask yourself: can you state your amount, expiry and direction out loud before your next practice trade opens?

Practising the Mechanics

Placing one on the practice balance follows a short, repeatable sequence, and running that sequence slowly a few dozen times is worth more than reading about it for an hour.

The order flow itself takes seconds. What takes practice is doing it the same way every time, without hunting for a chart that looks exciting. Here is the sequence, described as the platform documented it in August 2026.

1. Open your account and switch the balance selector to the practice mode. The virtual funds are credited automatically, so there is nothing to fund and nothing to approve.
2. Choose the fixed-time instrument list and pick a single asset to work with for the whole session.
3. Set your stake amount. Keep it identical across the session so the results are comparable.
4. Set the expiry. Again, hold it constant for the session.
5. Decide direction, confirm the trade, and then leave the order panel alone.
6. Watch the countdown to expiry without opening a second trade.
7. Record the outcome and the reason you gave for the direction before you placed it.

Choosing expiry

Expiry choice is where most beginners drift. Very short windows reward reaction speed and punish thinking; longer windows let a trend or a level actually matter. Neither is inherently better, but mixing them at random inside one practice session destroys any chance of learning something from the results. Pick one length, run twenty trades, then change it deliberately and run twenty more.

Reading the countdown

Once the trade is live, the countdown is the only thing that changes your situation. The price may cross your entry level several times before expiry, and none of those crossings count. Watching that happen on virtual funds teaches something a tutorial cannot: how strong the urge is to react to a move you cannot act on. Sit with it. That feeling gets sharper with real money behind it.

Result at close

At expiry the platform settles the trade against the entry level and adjusts the practice balance. Write down what happened while it is fresh. A session log with the asset, the expiry, the stake, your stated reason and the result is the raw material for everything in the sections below, and it costs nothing but a line of text per trade.

The mechanics become automatic faster than the judgement does, and only one of those two is worth money, so which part of the sequence are you still improvising?

Learning Risk Control

Risk control on a short-dated product comes down to two levers you actually govern: how much goes into each trade, and how many trades you allow yourself in a sitting.

You do not control the market, the payout structure or the expiry mechanics. You control stake size and trade count. That is a small toolkit, and rehearsing it on virtual funds is the point of the whole exercise. A practice account where every stake is a different size and the trade count depends on your mood teaches nothing except that the buttons work.

Fixed stake sizing

The simplest rule is a fixed fraction of the balance per trade, held constant regardless of how the last one went. Traders who raise the stake after a loss to win it back tend to discover the flaw in that plan at the worst possible moment. On the demo the discovery is free.

• Pick a small percentage of the practice balance and treat it as the stake for every trade that session.
• Do not increase it after a loss. Do not increase it after a win either.
• Recalculate the fraction between sessions, not inside one.
• If a rule feels restrictive on virtual funds, it will feel unbearable on real ones. That is useful information about the rule, and about you.

Avoiding over-trading

Short expiries make it possible to place a great many trades in a short time, and the platform will happily let you. Volume is not progress. Each additional trade placed because the last one lost is a decision made by frustration rather than by a plan, and frustration scales badly. Cap the session before you start, and stop at the cap even if the last trade was a winner.

Managing frequency

Frequency is the quiet variable nobody tracks. Ten considered trades across an hour and forty impulsive ones in the same hour can post similar results on a demo while representing completely different habits. Log the timestamps along with the outcomes. If the gaps between your trades shrink as the session goes on, you are reacting rather than deciding, and that pattern will follow you into a funded account.

Stake size and trade count are the two habits that survive the move to real money intact, so before your next session: what is your cap, and will you honour it after three losses?

Building Confidence

Repetition without money at stake builds a specific and limited kind of assurance: you stop fumbling the process, which frees attention for the decision that actually matters.

Confidence is worth having in the mechanical parts and worth distrusting in the predictive parts. Knowing where the expiry selector lives, what your stake rule is and how a settlement looks should become automatic. Believing you have found a reliable way to call short-term direction because a virtual balance went up for a week is a different thing entirely, and the platform makes both feel similar.

Repeated practice

Short, frequent sessions beat marathon ones. Twenty trades under a single rule set, repeated across several days, produce something you can actually read. The virtual balance can be topped up at no charge if a run of losses leaves you short, which means an experiment can be repeated cleanly instead of abandoned halfway.

Reviewing outcomes

Review is where practice turns into learning. Go through the log and sort the trades by the reason you gave, not by the result. Reasons that produce mixed outcomes across many trades were probably never reasons at all.

• Group trades by stated setup, then compare groups rather than individual trades.
• Note the trades you placed with no stated reason. That count is a habit metric.
• Look for losses that came from process failures, such as a mistimed click or a wrong stake, and separate them from losses that came from a correct process and an unfavourable move.

No money at stake

The absence of real exposure is the feature and the flaw. It lets you repeat, experiment and fail without cost. It also removes the pressure that changes how people behave, which is the single biggest reason demo results overstate what a person will do live. Hold both ideas at once: the practice is valuable, and the emotional rehearsal is missing from it.

Assurance about the process is earned on a demo while assurance about your predictions is not, so which of the two has actually grown since your first practice session?

Preparing for Real Fixed-Time

Moving to a funded balance changes almost nothing about the interface and almost everything about the experience, so the transition deserves a plan written before the first deposit.

The switch between the practice balance and the real one is a toggle on the same account, available on web, desktop and the mobile app. Because it is that easy, people cross it casually. Treat the crossing as a separate decision with its own conditions, and identity verification is part of moving to real-money trading and of withdrawing funds, so allow time for it rather than discovering it mid-session.

Carrying over discipline

The rules that governed your practice sessions only count if they survive contact with a funded balance. Write them down before you fund anything: stake fraction, session cap, the setups you will trade and the ones you will skip. A rule you have to invent in the moment is not a rule.

Modest first stakes

Your first real trades exist to test your own behaviour, not to make anything. Commit an amount whose loss would be unremarkable to you, because trading carries a risk of losing the money you put in, and fixed-time trading is high-risk and short-dated by design. If the smallest sensible stake still makes you uneasy, that is a signal about readiness rather than about the platform.

Realistic expectations

Fills, spreads and available conditions on a live balance are not obliged to match what the practice environment showed you, and demo results do not predict live results. Expect a step down in performance and plan for it. Also check the rules where you live: the legality and availability of this kind of trading vary by country, and platform terms change, so read the platform's own terms and legal pages rather than relying on any summary, including this one.

• Verify your identity before you plan to trade, not during a session.
• Fund an amount you can lose without adjusting anything else in your life.
• Keep the practice mode open alongside the real one and use it whenever you want to try something new.
• Re-read your written rules at the start of each live session for the first month.

The demo has done its job when the only new variable at your first funded trade is your own reaction, so is anything else still untested going into that trade?