IC Markets Demo Account for India: Test Before FEMA Even Applies

Why a demo is the easiest first step from India

• Run MT4, MT5 or cTrader on simulated money with no remittance, no base-currency decision and no verification file to upload.
• Confirm the symbol you want is actually quoted: 2,250 instruments reach MetaTrader accounts, only 121 reach cTrader.
• Watch the tier schedule bite as a position grows past 25 and then 50 lots, which is where headline leverage stops describing the margin.
• Trade it at the hours you would really trade — New York server time, 9h30m to 10h30m behind IST depending on the season.

A demo is the only stage of this broker that needs no remittance at all, so it sits outside both the RBI Alert List question and the Liberalised Remittance Scheme question entirely. Use it for the things it settles honestly: how much a position actually locks once it crosses a leverage tier, which is worked in full on the margin page, and how a symbol with a large overnight holding fee behaves — gold is the extreme case at USD 62 per lot per night.

What the demo actually simulates, and why it is useful before the funding question

What a demo issues is a second set of platform credentials pointed at a simulated balance on a separate server. Orders are placed, filled and closed inside the genuine terminal, and nothing about the process requires a bank, a card or a border crossing. That is the whole of its value and the whole of its limitation in one sentence.

It is a bad instrument for anything involving competition for liquidity. Nothing you place on a demo queues against anyone, so the fills it gives you in a thin or fast market are simulations of a simulation. Read it as a test of the instrument, not a test of the strategy.

Demo versus live: where the two genuinely diverge for an Indian reader

Two habits make the difference between a useful demo month and a misleading one. Size positions the way you would size them live, in lots rather than in confidence, because the tier boundaries at 25 and 50 lots are where the margin arithmetic stops being linear. And run it at your real hours rather than convenient ones: the London session opens at 12:30 or 13:30 IST and the New York equity session at 19:00 or 20:00 IST, closing at 01:30 or 02:30 IST the following morning.

Read together, that puts the demo in its right place. It settles mechanics, sizing and timing, and it settles them for free. Everything about cost and eligibility waits for the sections below.

Moving from demo to live: what changes

The terminal is the part that carries over unchanged. Everything else that follows a demo is listed below, in the order it actually happens.

Four costs a demo will never charge you

The prices match; the bill does not. Commission is the first gap: a live Raw Spread account pays USD 3.50 per lot per side, a USD 7.00 round turn worth about 0.7 pips on EUR/USD, while Standard folds the same order of cost into a spread quoted from 0.8 pips. The second is the overnight line — on a Swap Free account the swap is replaced by a flat published per-lot holding fee, USD 62 a night on gold, USD 25 on the US30 index, USD 11 on EURUSD, USD 9 on silver. The third is the Higher Margin Requirement window, which temporarily caps leverage daily around the close and open, at weekends around the Friday close and Monday open, and around high-impact news. The fourth is the currency conversion, which happens at your card issuer or bank on the way in and again on the way out, and appears on no IC Markets fee schedule at all.

What the demo does reproduce, and is worth using for

The instrument list is real — 2,250 symbols on a MetaTrader account against 121 on cTrader — as are the order types, the tier structure of margin and the 50% stop out. That makes a demo the cheapest honest way to answer mechanical questions: how much margin a 60-lot position actually locks once it crosses two tier boundaries, what the platform does when equity approaches half of it, whether the symbol you want is quoted at all, and how the terminal behaves at the hours you would really be trading. Those hours are worth checking: MetaTrader accounts run on New York servers, 9 hours 30 minutes behind IST from March to November and 10 hours 30 minutes behind the rest of the year, while cTrader runs on London servers, 4 hours 30 minutes and 5 hours 30 minutes behind.

Three gates between a demo and a funded account, in order

First, verification. Proof of identity and proof of address are required, and payments from a third party are refused outright — the name on the account and the name on the funding instrument have to be the same, with joint accounts accepted only where the client is one of the parties.

Second, the base currency. Ten are published — USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD and CAD — and the rupee is not among them, so the choice made at registration fixes the currency of every figure the account will ever show. There is no Indian funding route either: the broker's funding page carries local bank routes for Thailand and Vietnam only, leaving cards, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, UnionPay and wire transfer as the cross-border options, with money required to return to the source it came from.

Third, the remittance itself. IC Markets appears as entry 22 on the Reserve Bank of India's Alert List, revised 19 November 2025, and the RBI has stated that remittances for margin trading with an overseas counterparty are not a permitted purpose under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, the Foreign Exchange Management Act channel most retail transfers use. The counterparty itself is Raw Trading Ltd of Seychelles, under FSA Securities Dealer licence SD018, with no Indian regulator behind the relationship. A demo passes none of these three gates because it never reaches them, which is exactly the sense in which it is free. Read the RBI's own pages at rbi.org.in before the third gate becomes yours.

What a demo does and does not reproduce

Those rows describe a funded account. A demo reproduces the platform and the quotes and nothing else on the list — not the verification state, not the commission, not the conversion. Published terms as of 2 September 2026; leverage means a high risk of losing money.

Live account facts a demo cannot show you

Every row here starts to cost money the day the account is funded, which is exactly why none of them shows up during a demo month. Confirm the current figures before trading.

Pricing to compare against your live statement

Find your own account type in that table before concluding that a charge is a mistake — the three rows carry the cost in visibly different places. Leverage carries a high risk of losing money.

Related IC Markets pages