Yep, CMC for my sins, I've been with them for years and I just don't have the heart to leave CMC's quotes are about the closest to the interbank market I have come across, I had a Reuters 3000 Xtra feed running alongside for a while. Plus I like the way they handle market orders....and they pay me money any time I complain about something, it's a great relationship
LOL For trading with CMC? Better make it a bravery award (just out of that Oanda trade now, 3 nearly 4 hours later and after having to average into a losing position!)
well, different quotes vary with the various liquidity pools of the brokers. it's perfectly normal to have different providers having different quotes and i don't think there is a "correct" one. even on the interbank, when using Reuters and you deal with banks in particular, they will give you different quotes for your request so the correct price is the one both parties agree upon. the system merely electronically picks the best offer for you and then based on volume makes up a "book". don't scalp is the only advice. scalp a centralized market when your data bandwith and execution speed allow you to, but other than that, try and keep a bit further from the market. especially on the fx.
Don't scalp with Oanda would be more accurate, scalping with CMC is definitely more profitable, you get an average 2 or 3 pips less with Oanda but it's still profitable. Longer term trading is fine if that's your style, the rewards from positional and scalping are comparable overall I believe. Talking of which, Ivan's Usd/Cad trade is doing great, have you moved your stop up again Ivan?
I use a daily, hourly, Gartley, fibb approach, but because i hate lossing so much, i use lower timeframes for finer entries. Yesterdays entry (short) was missed, but the EUR/USD gave another opp. after hitting 127% returning to 100%, it doesn't happen all the time, but yesterdays move was a classic.
As i understand you have been profitable with oanda as your broker. I recently stumble upon this forum: http://www.cyrox.com/forum/index.php?topic=29.0 ...and people there says that when you turn profitable you start to experience slippage probably because of the fact that oanda has to start hedging your trades. Did you ever noticed something like that happening to you or is slippage maybe affecting only very short term scalpers?