The practice room
Sandbox Notes is a small independent editorial project about one narrow subject: the free practice account attached to short-expiry trading platforms, and specifically the Pocket Option demo. We are not Pocket Option, we hold no client money, and we cannot act on anybody's account.
What this site is for
Most writing about practice accounts is either a feature list or an advertisement. We wanted a set of pages that answers the practical questions properly — what the demo gives you, what it cannot do, and how to tell when it has stopped teaching you anything — and that is honest about the gap between a practice record and a funded one.
The editorial position throughout is simple. A free practice account is the sensible first step for anyone curious about this style of trading, and a practice result says nothing about how you will behave when a loss costs you something. Both halves of that sentence appear on almost every page here.
How the pages are researched
- Published facts first. Figures come from Pocket Option's own pages, quoted or paraphrased, with the date they were checked. The current check date is August 2, 2026.
- Unpublished numbers get a range or nothing. The starting practice balance and the minimum deposit are the clearest examples: both are widely repeated and neither is stated in a document we could verify, so we hedge the first and omit the second entirely.
- No claimed testing. We have not run a measured benchmark of execution quality, a live audit or a user study, and nothing here is presented as one.
- Fit rather than verdicts. Pages end with who a feature suits and who it does not, instead of a score out of ten.
Who writes it
Editorial work is carried out by Priya Raghunathan, Trading Education Editor, who is responsible for what appears here. Corrections are welcome and are made promptly; if something on this site is out of date or wrong, the fastest way to fix it is to tell us.
What we will not do
We do not publish profit claims, signal calls, guaranteed returns or trading advice. We do not tell you that a practice result predicts a live one. And we do not present the operator's marketing figures as our own measurements — where a number is the operator's claim, we say so.
How the site pays for itself
Some links to Pocket Option are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you open an account through one. That arrangement pays for the site and has no influence on what the pages say, which is why you will find a good deal here that a pure advertisement would leave out. The full explanation is on our disclosure page.
Trading carries a risk of losing the money you put in. Nothing on this site is financial, legal or tax advice, and platform facts should always be rechecked against the operator's own current pages before you act on them.