Companies offering services on the forex market, provide newcomers with possibility to learn the trading terminal functions, by "trading" in demo mode without any risks of losing real money.
"Test of skills" and success of "demo-trading" makes beginner trader to shift to the real trading without losing time of trading on demo account. But more often, expectations exceed reality - real money are getting away from the new "trader". Search for the reasons of it happening concludes on commercial grade articles about the psychology and the fear of losing money. The outcome about "unjustified fear" is really dangerous for the beginner, and the Brokers are pushing to this conclusion, especially in cases when they are market makers for a small time trader. Psychology matters, especially for the emotional people. It is commonly knows and apparent. But it is not the whole truth.
Analysis of the most active currency pairs, shows a match on real and demo accounts. But the quote charts - are not the same as charts that were thought in algebra class at school. To fully understand it , you need to have a degree in math. Yes, traders know the terms like "gap" and "fractal", but not all are thinking in terms of no differentiability of currency pair charts as a time function, and not in one point. The quotes chart is really reminding of Weierstrass function at any timeframe. In practical terms, all of the above is mentioned basically for the trader to not only create a profitable trading algorithm(a strategy), but also to justify its stability in moderate technical sense. For it, strategy needs to be formalized - programming of a so-called robot (advisor, expert) and its tests on the historical data of high quality. When writing an advisor for the purpose of algorithm's performance modelling on historical quotes, it is necessary to establish the conditions to exit the position, without letting stop-losses to take place, for example, upon the news release in the middle of a minute candle (minimal time frame for chart modelling) of high amplitude, because such closing point is not certain - can appear to be inside a gap; in reality, position will be closed with worse quote for a trader. And, this is related to the position opening point on real account with possible re-quote, delay and follow up offer for the worse price.
But even if the trading algorithm passed the tests of modelling, it can only be suitable for practical use only if math expectancy is exceeding the spread of a market maker. Exceeded math expectancy - a sign of a profitable strategy. It is recommended, that only past quality tests on "history", algorithm can be tried in practice on real trading account with the risk of real money. The drawdown must be controlled, if it exceeds maximal historical drawdown, use of the algorithm should be stopped, model the algorithms performance on the new historical data, and to review the outcome. As the record drawdown is a sign of quality changes in the market, rendering the strategy useless for the long term. So it is recommended for the trader to have more than one strategy in favor - as diversity is a good thing.