After the confirm

Your first trade, after the confirm: the row it becomes (Nigeria)

Filling in the ticket is the short part. The rest happens in panels the ticket never mentions — one row while the trade runs, one line once it is over.

A first trade belongs on a demo account, with virtual money, so nothing is at stake except the exercise. The lesson is not the click but everything the platform prints in reply to it.

Assume the ordinary attempt: a practice account opened with an email and a password, no documents, no deposit (demo account), EUR/USD — the euro priced in dollars — and 0.01 lots, the smallest size.

The panel that stays empty until you confirm

Below the chart sits a strip of column headings with nothing underneath. Before a first trade it looks broken. It is the list of open trades, and confirming an order is the only thing that fills it.

The ticket disappears the moment it is sent, with no draft kept. One row has replaced it, and that row is the receipt: if none appeared, nothing was sent, and confirming again starts a second trade rather than repairing the first.

One row, column by column — and what each reads at the end

Column	Who put it there	What it reads at the close
Instrument	typed into the ticket	unchanged — the column that never moved
Direction — buy or sell	chosen on the ticket	unchanged; it decided which way the result was counted
Size — 0.01 lots	typed, and it scales every other figure	unchanged; a whole lot is 100,000 euros
Opening price	stamped at execution, not typed	kept, as the first half of a pair
Exit level — the stop-loss	typed on the ticket, then held off-screen	blank — the instruction is spent
Price now	rewritten with every tick	frozen at the closing second
Result	recounted every tick, provisional	settled, and it moves the balance line

The result column already reads slightly negative from the start: the spread — the gap between the buy and sell price, and the main cost of a trade — is charged at the entry.

A pip here is worth about 10 cents, 1.1000 to 1.1001 being one, so an exit 20 pips out stands in front of roughly two dollars. Other sizes: the practice calculator; units 100 times smaller: a Standard Cent account (account types).

Three of those columns can no longer be typed

Instrument, direction and size are settled the instant the row exists, and no panel edits them while the trade runs — the remedy is to close it and send another, paying a second spread. Only the exit level stays open to a keystroke, on the row itself.

The close, panel by panel

Closing is three events at once: the row leaves the list of open trades; a line appears in the record of finished trades, with an entry, an exit and a total; and the balance line moves for the first time, since while the trade ran the result lived only on the row.

What no record carries is who ended it: a trade closed by hand and one closed by its own exit level leave lines of the same shape. Closing on purpose, after an hour or a day, is the one decision the exercise asks for — and no panel remembers it was one.

Four things no column keeps

Why the trade was placed. No field asks for a reason, before or after.
The worst point it passed through. The result column showed it once, then overwrote it.
What watching it felt like. The reading that changes most once the money is real — demo results don't guarantee real-account results.
Whether the direction was more than a toss. For a learning trade it hardly matters — the process was being practised.

Hence three lines by hand — the reason, the exit level, the mood: the columns the platform does not print. This site is an independent guide, not a broker: it opens no accounts, holds no money and takes no documents.

Questions asked with the row still open

Confirm was pressed and the strip is still empty — what happened?

Then no trade exists — an unsent order leaves nothing behind. Fill the ticket in again.

The size on the row is not what was meant. Which panel fixes it?

None. Closing the row and sending a smaller one is the whole repair.

The result column has been positive all afternoon, so why has the balance line not moved?

Because a figure on an open row is provisional, and reaches the balance only at the close.

A figure nobody typed appeared on the row overnight — what is it?

Swap — the small charge for holding a trade overnight, stated by the platform beforehand.

Does a second trade share this row or start its own?

Its own. Two rows at once leave no figure traceable to one decision.

Is there a column that says why the trade was placed?

None of them. That column is the notebook, filled in at the time.

Questions asked once the row has gone

Which panel is worth opening first after a close?

The record of finished trades, while the numbers still mean something; the balance shows only a total.

Can a line in that record be corrected, annotated or removed?

No. It states what happened; any note of your own lives outside it.

Does the record show whether the exit level did the closing?

Not in words — compare the closing price with the level typed earlier.

The trade ended while the laptop was shut. What is left to read?

The finished line and the moved balance — the live columns were displayed, never stored.

What is worth copying off the row before closing it?

The result at the moment the decision was taken; afterwards only the closing figure exists.

These lines are virtual money — is the record worth keeping?

It is all the exercise produces. One result is noise; a run of rows is not.

Where these columns come from

Trading words

Order, position, trade: one event moving between three lists.

Check a label

Practice calculator

The size column decides what every other figure is worth.

Run the numbers

Beginner mistakes

What goes wrong on rows two and three.

Read the list

Every row above appears for nothing.

An email and a password open a free practice account with virtual money — no deposit, no documents, no time limit. Place one small trade and read the row.

Open a free demo at Exness