Congrats for what you are doing and I sincerely hope you will get there. Personally I think it's really a waste of time to trade with little to no money. Therefore Demo makes sense ... Why waste time and take the risk of losing real money ?
Because the psychology of trading real money is totally different from trading a demo account even when it is just a small real account. At least then you have something on the line and with demo you don't. There are plenty of stories out there of traders who were successful on demo but failed once going live due to FOMO, cutting winners short out of fear, letting losers run out of hope, ... Those feelings can't be replicated in demo.
But it's never been done before and never will be, according to you. So why are you bothering with this?
That's true. Real money feels different. But little money in a brokerage account is mostly considered "Play" money. We don't approach meaningless money the same way as we do approach a meaningful amount. Someone playing with 1K Real or 1M demo is going to have the same problem to cope with 1M real dollars. Why bother rewarding the bad behaviors with 1K in the real world ? When you can try to hone real skills with 1M in a demo account. Someone not having success with Demo don't even need to bother going live. I believe it's better to be successful first in demo then move on to the psychological stuffs. Most traders wouldn't even pass the demo challenge but they prefer to burn play money for real. It tells a lot about them ... They don't have the patience ... They certainly have gambling issues. They prefer to lose rather than saving money. Maybe less than 95% would lose if they didn't skip the 1st step.
But you can't, if you have absolutely no experience surely demo is the way to start. But it seems like OP is successful on demo so there is nothing else to learn there, the rest he needs to learn with real money, experience the psychological effects of losing real money and learn how to handle it. You can stick to trading demo forever and ever but you will never experience those feelings, you will never learn how you act when you experience those feelings and you will never learn how to handle those feelings. There is absolutely no point in staying on demo if you are profitable there because it will never be like trading real money. You act like i am saying there is no point in demo trading at all but that absolutely isn't the case, demo is useful up to a certain point, once you are consistently profitable there is no reason to stay on demo since you have only learned half, or maybe even less from what you actually need to learn. I imagine there a very few traders starting out with one million real dollars, so you learn how to handle the psychology of trading real money well before you reach that amount and if you don't you will most likely never reach a million in the first place. Not everyone has deep pockets, for some people $1K can be a lot of money, for others one million is peanuts. If someone has just a few thousand in the bank $1K certainly will not feel as play money. The more money you have the more money you will have to risk before you will experience the psychological effects of losing money, but at some stage you will experience it and you won't learn how to handle it from trading a demo account. You know why most people lose, right? Psychology and horrible risk management because of it, something you will never learn in demo. Surely you can learn risk management in demo, but then the psychological effects come into play ...