The news is good, we have attracted a large number of great traders since starting last year and 99% of these are trying hard to pass with solid risk management. As we grow and attract more and more great traders, we also unfortunately attract the attention of a small number of people trying to “game” the system. We’ll call these people Demo Raiders.
Demo Raiders are looking to manipulate the inherent simplification of demo market execution to make quick gains. This type of trading does not translate to the real live market and cannot make real money. It’s therefore pointless trading and it’s pointless for us to fund these people in the real market. In fact if we did, we’d lose a lot of money quite quickly.
Demo market executions are fake. Real market executions require a counterparty to accept the trade, this is known as liquidity. At high liquidity times, execution requests are filled quickly and at low liquidity times they are filled more slowly and sometimes not at all. The demo market fills all executions as if the market was always very liquid.
This mismatch of demo and real markets can give these Demo Raiders an “edge” on the demo market. There are numerous ways to manifest this demo edge. It’s an “edge” that does not exist on real markets, so it’s a pointless “edge”, because we and the Demo Traders can’t make any money from it.
It is not our intention to create new rules to forbid this type of trading. Any rules will be manipulated and or sidestepped anyway. Our terms and conditions do however state that we will not fund traders who have looked to manipulate the system.
The vast majority of our traders do not do this and have nothing to worry about. Please carry on trading as you normally do. However, if you are one of these Demo Raiders looking to quickly execute a trade at high volume and then immediately move your stop because you or your EA has “identified” a difference between the demo market and the real market, then please stop. Our systems will identify this type of trading and you won’t get a real live funded account.
Examples include:
Running a EA or Algorithm that looks to take advantage of unrealistic fills
Numerous (often in the hundreds) of rapid trades in and out
Almost instant auto stop loss movement and rapid auto-trailing
Abusive scalping with high leveraged trades that last seconds
Taking advantage of demo delays
Taking advantage of demo arbitrage
All prop firms and brokers have policies prohibiting this kind of trading behaviour.
Remember, we are putting you in the real market once you are on a live account. Real executions, real fills, all to make sure that when you make big profits, the money is there to pay you out. Our entire prop firm is built around ensuring traders who profit get paid.
Demo Raiders only have an “edge” in the demo market. Please don’t waste your or our time by thinking this type of trading will make you money. It won’t.
If you’d like to discuss your personal trading style with us, please feel free to contact us via a support ticket.