beginners always trade in a demo account for acquiring basic knowledge and experience but in practically they trade at random and got nothing ultimately. for that reason i think micro account is more appropriate for beginners as practice. whats your opinion ?
really its a complicated question to answer , i feel micro account can make beginners greedy at the first stage.
Demo account is a waste of time except to learn the platform you are using. Even if you did a demo account for months you eventually have to go live with real money and develop real discipline and emotional control. You wont have learnt that those skills with a demo.
I categorize traders into 3 levels: 1.newbie and inexperienced; 2.From experienced to consistently marginal profitable; 3.Better than consistently marginal profitable. For level 1, you need demo account; For level 2, you need real account; For level 3, the two kind of accounts don't make difference. For level 3 traders, either their minds are too strong to be impacted by emotion, or they have a solid system that eliminate human intervention, so their trading is immunized to emotion. Therefore demo or real accounts don't make any difference for them.
If one can't stay profitable, for over a year with demo, definitely he won't make the real $/€/£. Simple thing to solve.
Demo is good, but if you stick for too long to it, you will be reluctant for going to the live account, so along with a demo you should start using a live account as well.
There are both pros and cons in this approach. The drawback is that you'll lose these money, the advantage is that you can test your psychology to understand how your mind responds to profit and loss, i.e. handle events which involve various quite strong feelings like fear to lose, inability to accept loss or impatience in letting profitable trade run. But unfortunately self-reflection is not easy and newbies just lose money losing valuable lessons as well.
micro is the best thing that has ever happened for not only traders starting out but for people testing systems. nothing but nothing beats real money trading for learning, and the micro's are the best vehicle to get you there.
Actually at IB, there is a thirds option, the Paper Account. But one needs to understand the mechanics of the fills with the different systems. IB Paper is "top of book" fill on the add liquidity side. Which means you jump to the front of the order book que. In real markets there are people ahead of you, MKT orders, and then the other people with LMT orders that submitted before you. Any demo or paper simulator that uses "if touched" is too far off because it will "fill" the order on the "take liquidity side". These are called magic fills because you can , e.g. buy at the BID, automagically. In real markets you need to buy at the ASK, after waiting in line for other orders (MKT and earlier LMT) go first. Understand how the fills works first. For some trading it does not matter, for some it does a lot. If one can't figure out how this is important, then it is too early to be trading live. Then there is the psychological issues of real money, but that is a separate issue to deal with after one understand the basic mechanics. Hope that helps.