Take a look at this traders and you tell me the condition that the industry is in... They thought they destroyed and shredded this document all over the internet...but some of us still have it... ...now is MT4 written for traders or dealers...I will ask you again?
Unbelievable! The question should be --Why would anyone trade spot via dealers when futures on a regulated exchange are available? Makes zero sense.
fxvipservice, So this is my point. Until the Wild West of Forex gets a centralized feed (Reuters tried but it did not catch on) it is hard to ever know when a dealer is playing games with your account...it is hard to prove. I think that all of the dealers are thieves...including Oanda...But that is just me... It seems the business model does not support dealers to just make money off of the spread...or else their greed sets in after they mean well... Forex is Global and until we get a one-world economy (Biblical) the various countries will not fall in line and use a centralized feed...it is impossible to regulate Retail Spot Forex. If I wanted to open a Forex Firm, it is far too easy...I just need to come up with the money for MT4 and establish an entity...in ummm...the Bahamas...No offense fxvipservice.. ES
Savant: So if Oanda does not utilize MP4, by what means are they in your opinion "thieving" ... i.e. how ?
Pardon my ignorance ... I have an Oanda account from before they were called Oanda, but it has been idle for three years as I focused on my other business interests. Just trying to get back up to speed. Thanks for the answer.
there are no centralized feeds per se but there are aggregator platforms (lava, hotspot fx, ebs, reuters,...) that do exactly that and their price feeds probably correlate 98%+ with one global fx feed, if there existed one. I trade fx with interactive brokers for many years now and I very often enter market orders and can count the situations on one hand when I was dissatisfied with the fill. People who flat out deny the benefits of trading cash over futures are either ignorant or have very limited trading experience, imho. I agree with the OP in one sense, it comes down to the choice of broker. So far I have not seen any broker that offers MT4/5 platforms that deserves my trades, simple as that. But then I also do not trust Oanda either. I would never trade cash on a feed that does a) does not provide STP, AND b) ever had any sort of affiliation with shady broking practices (FXCM comes to mind, they claim they now also have a STP model but I would not touch them even with gloves).
Last time i was active in FX (three years ago) I traded both IB and Oanda forex at the same time, as kind of a personal experiment. I like their (oanda's) feed particularly for scalping as the volume seemed deep enough to read the short term support and resistance quite well. I could not get as clear a read with IB because I think forex was a add on business for them at that time and their in house volume was not as deep as was Oanda's. On swing trades, i did feel quite vulnerable to stop running with Oanda, (still not near as bad as was FXCM's) but again, one persons experience statistically means nothing. Maybe this is too simplistic, but it seems the logical solution to having stops hit is just to not use them. To do that, one must either scalp and manually stop or go really long term. I kind of like the idea of trading smaller amounts very long term in highly uncorrelated markets because trading costs are minimal, there are no stops to be hit. Forex is supposed to be one of the most trending markets there is and if that is true, then the whole thing is just a matter of trying to see the bigger picture and trying not to panic as it unfolds. Some of the posters have suggested that data is subject to manipulation, and if that is true, there is no point whatsoever in even using any numerical data analysis, technical analysis, etc, as the garbage in garbage out rule invalidates every indicator or even simply eyeballing the live feed.
So now one posters claims Oanda does not use Mp4 and another says they do! At least we got both sides of the story!