run this test before blaming demo or the live account

[Shadow Trader]

Demo gets blamed or praised constantly. Either "demo fills are fake" or "live is rigged". Before picking a side, a small test shows which part of the gap is real.

Step one: trade the same setup for 30 trades on demo and 30 on live at the smallest size possible, same session hours. Record the price the plan wanted against the price actually filled, on entry and exit.

Step two: compare slippage and spread paid, in pips, not in money. If live runs 0.4 pips worse per trade on average, that's a big bite out of a 5-pip scalp, and it's mechanical, not psychological.

Step three: compare behaviour. How often was a stop moved, a trade closed early, a valid setup skipped? On demo the answer is often "rarely". On live the numbers tend to jump. That part is the emotional gap, and no better fill fixes it.

Log it in a sheet with six columns: planned entry, filled entry, planned exit, filled exit, spread at entry, and a yes or no for whether the plan was followed. Nothing else is needed. Anything extra turns into homework that never gets finished.

Most demo-to-live gaps are a mix of the two. Demo fills are usually idealised, so some difference is expected. The question is how much of it is the platform and how much is the person at the keyboard.

A common surprise is that the slippage gap is small and the behaviour gap is large. Someone who moves the stop on one live trade in four and never on demo doesn't have a broker problem. Another surprise runs the other way, where one fast news hour accounts for most of the friction and the rest of the day looks identical to demo. Splitting the sample by hour takes two minutes and shows that quickly.

Smallest live size matters here, since the point is real money with little pressure. Otherwise the second test just measures fear.

Thirty trades is thin, so treat the outcome as a rough direction, not a verdict.

Which gap is bigger in your own numbers, execution friction or changed behaviour?