A little research brings up plenty of results. Forex traders could ask the same question about futures
Not if you scalp unprofitably They're not exactly 'bad' as you can still make money with them but for scalpers it's harder work and usually for less profit. Traders who, unlike scalpers, often target 50, 100, 200 pips aren't affected so much by Oanda's excessive widening of spreads, slippage, or quote manipulation, and they probably don't notice it as much as a scalper does.
Just as a note, spread-widening on MB Trading or Hotspot are as wide and often wider than on Oanda. Altho it gets down to the usual spreads faster on these platforms.
I can't imagine scalping on Oanda w/o using the API. You're forced to set units and confirm each trade with the UI.
What??!! So if You write Your program in C++ API for Oanda, anytime the system wants to enter the trade, You have to confirm it manually??????????????????????????????????? That would be ridiculous!
You do know you can set up 1 click trading by checking 'keep window open' on the ticket and turning off confirmations, right? Scalping on Oanda worked for me for quite a while with some fairly good results, for example That was just 4 short months ago, I couldn't do it today with Oanda and get anywhere near the same results. I had a good run and quit while I was ahead
I agree, on Barx cable can be 30 wide but only for a few seconds, Oanda's 20 wide for 10 minutes is ridiculous.
Your 10 minutes must be a one time incident. They usually go back after a minute or so. Today at ADP release they didn't widen at all, whereas hotspot (my 2nd broker) was 20+ on cable.