How does a trader test his/her strategies and abilities without paying (or paying too a lot) for his/her mistakes ?
I would say there are three possible answers.

One first answer, needless to say, is by paper buying and selling. Paper trading means that you don’t actually execute your orders, but you only “bookkeep” them, testing on paper what their results would be.

At the following level you can buy and sell in a simulated account. This is similar to paper dealing, as you aren’t dealing with real money, but just testing the result of your strategies; on the other side having a simulated account you’re really using you Broker platform so you might be at the same time training yourself in dealing with order execution issues.
Simulated accounts are nowadays offered by many Brokers; inside the Forex marketplace it can be common to get this feature.

Say you trade your strategy for some time with a simulated account, and everything goes fine; you would expect that real trading should go fine as well. Still, there is certainly an issue you did not deal with: your emotions. These will come into the game only when you trade with your real funds. Emotions can do a big difference. They often explain differencies in results in between traders that will be completely comparable in terms of marketplace know-how and strategy. Why ? simply because they often force you not to follow the rules of your trading plan. Emotions can make you a hard life in keeping the necessary discipline.

So, how to deal with the emotional issue of trading ? You can find ways to learn also in this topic, obviously, but in this case your own direct encounter is more tough to replace, in my opinion. However, the experience can be expensive, of course. A possible solution is always to buy and sell with real money, but in a really tiny size. This is always a good idea at the beginning. Begin little, gain experience and then improve gradually your trading size.

So the third answer to our very first question is: by trading tiny. You might object that, if the trading size is as well small, your emotional involvement will also be tiny, so the aim of putting emotions into the game is missed. Partly, this really is accurate. However, the difference between using real money and just playing with numbers is there. And also the decision about how big the size should be, is just yours.

The forex market gives you big flexibiliy about your trading size.
Very first, simply because the minimum required to open an account can be truly tiny, in the order of $300. Trading size of course may be little too. The Forex market offers you a great leverage possibility, but again, how much of it to use is something that only you can determine.
Second, because in the forex market it’s common for Brokers not to charge a fix commission to trades. The cost with the buy and sell is generally represented only by the bid-ask spread. This means that tiny trades aren’t penalized by fix commissions.
This flexibility can offer an advantage for traders who want to gain knowledge before moving forward.

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