We greatly appreciate your business and support in 2010. May the upcoming year bring you much happiness and prosperity. As you know, OANDA Corporation is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and National Futures Association (NFA). Each year, these regulators require us to send our clients: A copy of OANDA's privacy policy, which you can find below. A link to the NFA's Background Affiliation Status Information Center (BASIC), which is http://www.nfa.futures.org/basicnet/. On this web site you can look up information on OANDA (NFA ID: 0325821) as well as our competitors who are also regulated by the NFA. CFTC Regulatory Changes and OANDA The CFTC issued new forex rules last year that came into effect in October. The most newsworthy change was a reduction in leverage limits. These reduced limits were in line with the levels OANDA already provided, so had minimal effect on our traders. We want to take this opportunity to thank all our customers who wrote to the CFTC voicing their concerns over how the extremely low leverage limits originally proposed by the regulatory body would affect forex trading in the United States. We were impressed with the quality and insight of comments submitted by our clients and the U.S. trading public in general. Their opinions had a strong effect on the CFTC's final choices. As part of the new CFTC rules, retail forex brokers must publish every quarter the percentage of customer accounts that were profitable. At OANDA, 48% of customer accounts were profitable in the third quarter of 2010, and 44% in the fourth quarter. We had by far the highest proportion of profitable accounts of any U.S. retail forex dealer. Why Is OANDA Different? There was considerable debate on why OANDA stood out from our competitors on the profitability numbers. From our point of view, our clients have several unique advantages. For example, we do not eat away at their balances with "non-activity" fees. We allow them to trade any amount, to better fit their trading strategies. We pay second-by-second interest on account balances, in contrast to some other brokers. But in the end, we believe the key advantages we offer our traders are quality of execution and tight spreads. Spreads are the effective cost of trading, and have a material difference on trading results. Many traders do not fully realize that a spread even one tenth of one pip lower can turn a profitable trading strategy into a non-profitable one. Developments in 2010 The OANDA team works hard every day to improve our products. This work may not always be visible to you, but it helps us keep spreads tight and continually improve quality of execution. Perhaps this innovation is one reason we had a 60% increase in trading volume from Q1 2010 to Q4 2010. In addition: We launched a suite of mobile trading apps designed for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry. Almost 25% of logins to our trading platform already originate from mobile devices, and this percentage is growing quickly. We thank all our customers who provided their feedback to help us improve these apps. We updated the fxTrade web site to better tell our story and consolidate our many trading resources. We introduced enhanced account statements so you can better understand and act on your trading style. We improved our currency converter for the millions of monthly users who depend on OANDA's rates. New and repeat visitors gave us glowing reviews, and traffic to the converter increased over 40%. There will be many more exciting developments in 2011, including the imminent release of a MetaTrader 4 trading platform. This additional platform release has been eagerly anticipated by many MT4 traders, who want customizable, automated access to our low spreads. We thank you for trading at OANDA, and for using our services at fxConsulting and fxGlobalTransfer. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions, so please do not hesitate to contact us. Sincerely, Michael Stumm and the OANDA team
I guess he doesn't send these e-mails to the pikers, like me? Looks like I'll get a 4 hour chart, finally.
I am not anything (not even a fart in a skillet)...Check and make sure your email address is correct..call Oanda at (212) 858-7690 ES
maybe location - didn't send me one yes, I'll use their mt 'unlimited demo' for analysis but won't use it to enter trades - too slow didn't mention anything about NFP disconnections though
I'm still new to Oanda but honestly, the spreads are damn good and I'd like to keep it that way. Give me bare bones . Whatever you do just don't pull an FXCM and jack rates up in the name of technological advances . I'm more than happy with you guys and the spreads. Thanks again Oanda.
Fart in a skillet? I'll chart with MT4, but I lose just fine with the reg. platform. They verified my e-mail with the last margin call warning.....
Well...Everybody got this email with the MT4 news, I am told...And I am still nothing (wet behind the ears). ES