Demo journal versus live journal: what the gap is made of

[FXS London Scalper]

Trading one strategy on a demo and a live account in parallel for a few months, and journaling both, tells you what real money adds to the cost.

What to compare:

• Win rate.
• Average slippage on entries and stops.
• Missed entries, especially where any manual confirmation is involved.
• Net R.

Where the gap usually comes from:

Execution. Demo fills tend to be cleaner. Live slippage of a couple of tenths of a pip is common, and that adds up over hundreds of trades.

Hesitation. Even an "automated" system often has a manual step somewhere. With real money people hesitate more, so live misses entries demo takes.

Costs. Some demo accounts show tighter spreads than live, especially in quiet hours.

A worked example: if demo makes 0.20R per trade, live slippage costs 0.03R and missed winners another 0.02R, live is at 0.15R, a quarter lower, with the strategy unchanged.

So demo results are a useful upper bound, not an estimate. Measure your own gap and plan with that discount.

Have others compared demo and live directly? What gap did you see?