just thought i'd do a little consumer advocacy work before i called it a day: I recently opened an account with oanda because I had read they were the least bucket shop of all the bucket shops in forex. unfortunately, shortly after i opened the account I noticed they had blatantly triggered one of my overnight stops 40 pips away from the market. Oanda credited me my loss back, but this event made me withdrawal 90% of my money with them. This weekend oanda demonstrated they had learned their lesson: they would have to actually move the market to my stop for 5 seconds in the aftermarket to trigger the stop. Now tech support can claim the stop was triggered legitimately. Granted, this was only a $25 fleecing, but perhaps my food money will save somebody more in the future.
aftermarket? lol...most dealers do not allow you to trade over the weekend... Why don't you tell us what you think the primary market is in Retail spot forex?
Why would anyone even consider betting with a forex bucketshop now there are plenty of direct access options?
If you'd like this report to be credible, more details are needed. A chart attached to your reply would be most helpful. "Show All Activity" button in the upper right corner should be on. A distant second option would be to specify currency pair, long or short, stop loss price, date and time.
Them making a mistake and crediting back the amount to your account could happen anywhere, it's more in the way problems are being solved. Oanda gunning for your 25 USD trade is certainly a joke. Ofcourse over the wknd they widen the spread so if stops are quite close to where the market is one has a risk of being executed. This can be seen as a downside of Oanda's platform, but you can also see the upside which is the ability to trade 24/7. As others have stated aswell, please provide documentation of the problem so we can all asses it. Oanda has always been very fair to me, all problems that happened in the years I have been trading with them have been solved in a correct manner.
How much do they widen spreads over the weekend on say cable and euro ? I heard they also do this during even minor news releases ?
10 pips on Cable and Euro but mind you, this is DURING the wknd, so one can actually trade these spreads on say saturday evening! They also widen spreads on news, but as i am not really trading news I don't mind. Also I must say that other brokers appear not to widen during news but they might only fill you if price is bad or freeze the platform. If one really wants to trade news one might want to search for another solution, for all other things Oanda is not a bad option.
ok thanks Cybren, don't actually trade the news myself but at the same time i don't wanna be stopped out of a trade during news releases because of my broker widening stops.
Oanda's posted daily spreads including weekends: http://fxtrade.oanda.com/resources/spreadstats/spreadsminmax.shtml