What is demo account results?

What it means

A demo server fills orders against quoted prices with unlimited liquidity and no market impact. Live execution supplies none of that. The differences concentrate exactly where short-term strategies earn their margin: slippage on entry and exit, spread widening during news and rollover, requotes, and rejections that a demo simply never issues.

Why it matters

The gap is largest for the strategies most often sold. A scalper taking small targets can have its entire edge consumed by execution quality; a position strategy holding for days barely notices. So the demo-to-live drop is not uniform noise — it is a systematic penalty weighted toward exactly the products marketed with the most impressive demo curves.

What this changes in practice

Treat demo results as evidence that the software runs, not that the strategy works. They confirm the logic executes, the orders are formed correctly and nothing crashes overnight, which is worth knowing. They do not establish profitability, and a vendor presenting demo performance as a track record has answered a question nobody asked.