When learning how to trade the financial markets, you need to learn a strategy or two to get started, most will find something off the internet or pay for one. The issue then is how good is that strategy and probably more importantly could you actually employ that strategy to profitable effect. Reading and knowing the rules is one thing but actually implementing them in a live market is another thing entirely. So it would make sense to be able to learn the strategy and how to implement it in an environment that is less testing in the first instance. Once you have learnt the strategy and how to use it then wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out how effective it is in different market conditions. In other words try and ascertain if you actually have what is termed as an Edge. An edge is knowing that over an X number of trades you will be profitable. You only need to be profitable 51% of the time to be profitable if you control your risk. Once you have a proven edge, wouldn’t it be good to be able to improve it. If you could improve your edge to around 60:40 win loss ratio then you would would have a significant edge on the market. This can also be done off line by back testing.