What a fill on touch means
Put a limit order to buy at $50.00 in most paper accounts and it fills the instant a trade prints at $50.00. The demo treats a touch as a fill.
At the exchange your order joins a queue. Everyone who placed a buy at $50.00 before you sits ahead. Your order fills when the sellers at $50.00 have worked through all of them, or when price moves through your level. If price touches $50.00 and bounces, you are not in.
Why it changes your results
Day trading edges are often a few cents a share. A demo that fills on touch gives you the best possible entry every time, so a strategy that makes four cents a share on paper can make one cent, or lose one, with real queue position.
Multiply that across a hundred trades a week and the same method goes from consistently profitable to quietly negative. Nothing about your reading of the chart changed. The fills did.
The two-monitor test
One trader on NexusFi ran a real account on one screen and a paper account on the other, and placed the same order on both at the same second. The paper account gained hundreds. The real account lost the same amount. Identical charts, identical orders, different fills.
Market orders are not safe either
A market order in a demo often fills at the last price you saw. In the market it fills at the next print, which at the open can be a tick or two away. Demos rarely model the spread, so they hide slippage too.
How to practise without the lie
- Use a simulator that models queue position and fills market orders at the next print, not the last one.
- Trade the account size you will actually fund, so a bad fill costs what it would cost.
- Keep every trade on the record, including the ones the queue kept you out of.
Day Trading Demo does all three. Limit orders sit behind the resting size at your price and fill when the market trades through it. Market orders take the next print. If a fill looks wrong, tell us the ticker and the time and we will check it against the tape.