Just posted again over on their forum, this is the post and the screenshots..... Oanda, Please explain these major quote discrepencies where you spiked price around 50 pips off-market for 10 seconds before coming back in line. Without any sort of explanation this looks suspiciously like blatant price manipulation to the detriment of your customers and in my opinion brings into question the integrity of your company. Why would an honest and straightforward marketmaker manipulate prices like that? The videos of price action can be downloaded from: 1) 6.69mb - http://www.mediafire.com/?ojdjax0dmxm 2) 1.85mb - http://www.mediafire.com/?dz21xxsxjjm ~
Actually Cabletrader, you shouldn't ask Oanda why such a glitch occured... and instead just profit from such 'problem' the next time
They're not arb opportunities unfortunately, that type of quote manipulation is designed not to allow anyone other than Oanda to profit from it, you would never get a market order filled at those prices.
Oh well, Stumm did a runner when the heat got turned up, guess I got my answer by his deafening silence!
cabletrader, do you really think issues like these are best resolved by posting your inquiry to a public forum? I think contacting Oanda directly will get you a better response. It's often non possible (due to client privacy obligations) or desirable (discussions get into flame wars / offtopic) for any company to respond to an individual question on a public forum. The message boards are not an official communication channel for Oanda (they post sporadically, mostly announcements only). You can't expect a timely reply when using the message boards for communication with Oanda. Just call or send them an email. You can always post your account of the conversation to the forums afterwards.
Hi TradingWise Well Michael Stumm made a brief appearance on the thread over in the Oanda forum before making a hasty exit, him and his staff are regular posters on those forums. Unfortunately his response didn't address the issue. Contacting Oanda directly with issues like this usually results in them referring to the 'How to fob off an irate client' manual and gets a standard response from page one...'clear your java cache' or 'it must be your ISP'. If that doesn't do the trick and as a last resort 'we make the prices, get lost!'. This isn't account or trade specific though so I'm not sure privacy comes into it, but I do see your point if it had been. I think the only way to deal with these types of problems is out in the open for everyone to see and have the opportunity to say their piece, after all it's in the public interest (or they should be interested!). If the initial query had been handled properly by Oanda they could have come out on top, as it is their silence speaks volumes. This has been the final straw for me, once all positions are closed I'll be setting up somewhere else, I can't be doing with that stuff, trading is challenging enough without going to war with the marketmaker every day!
While it is true that Oanda makes it's own prices, they do admit it when they are wrong. The regularly adjust prices on so called incorrect spikes. Did you contact Oanda after this spike requesting clarification and requesting that they revert all falsely executed orders?
Unfortunately Oanda refuse to even discuss their off-market quotes at that particular time, in fact they say the prices were valid, draw your own conclusions. In the absence of any plausible explanation it looks to me like a blatant case of price manipulation for their own benefit and if they are prepared to do something like that then it brings into question their integrity and therefore they're not a company I would recommend doing business with. Posting on their forum proved non-productive as far as an answer goes but it was worth a shot, the level of comprehension among it's posters seems severely limited, for example one poster thought Interactive Brokers and InterbankFX were the same company and then went on to say the quotes were latency, go figure! It's little wonder that Oanda can get away with stuff like this with impunity! This wasn't just a bad tick spike though, that would be understandable, this was a series of off-market quotes across a 10-second period before their prices reverted back to market. That is not acceptable by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not sure how frequently this occurs or to what degree, this just happened to be one example I captured on video. If you watch this short 1.8MB video clip you will see the move I'm referring to (20 seconds in): http://www.mediafire.com/?dz21xxsxjjm
Oanda is your market maker, the price action might be valid due to local orders, closing orders when they're positioned the wrong way (gamblers and long term positionals). Like another poster said, don't complain but profit from it.
I'm intrigued, how exactly would you do that when all you'll get is slippage? These aren't arb opportunities, I think I already said that somewhere. Believe me, if they were I wouldn't have mentioned it