I think Oanada are one of the best fx brokers to 'scalp' with since their spreads don't fluctuate plus B/S/C executions are Instant, and during rth the spread is usually 0.9 pips, it has though lately increased to 1.2 pips as to widening spreads, usually the maximum for the eurusd is 10 pips and I've seen it as high as 20 pips during the May weekend Greece funding announcement http://fxtrade.oanda.com/why/spreads/recent I haven't compared if and how wide other broker spreads become at the same time as the Oanda spread widens, so can't say if other brokers also responded at the same time as Oanda and how wide their spreads went. old FXCM example: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=142708
Wallace kindly put up the link to OANDA recent spread history, which is worth commenting upon. Generally speaking OANDA's spread is very competitive, but if you take a second look, you will see the green line spike frequently in each pair during the course of the week. This is primarily the 'flash-widening' I referred to earlier over news events. None of this is a particular problem from market order entries, as you can see in advance what you are getting, but it plays financial havoc on all stop losses, and any stop-limit orders. Because of this my contention is that OANDA is not the place for scalpers, breakout players and any others that a looking to quickly jump on short-term trends. ~chaffcombe
Same here. I do it in Futures land. I tried OANDA Demo 4 or 5 years ago. Wasn't that impressed with the stability. Good that things working for you. What size can you get filled on @OANDA?
Anywhere up to 1,000,000 units. Best execution I've found, other than the days when there are connection problems of course.
I have been trading with OANDA for years so I know them, it used to be an excellent broker, until about 2 years ago, when it became very difficult to trade on news, as the spread systematically widened up to 50 pips . But now anything goes, it's gone to shit, sometimes charts dont update, orders are delayed, and then disconnections .
This is the feed from Dukascopy during last week's NFP report. Note how the spread blew out to over 20 pips follwing the announcement. Oanda's spread was about 10 pips. ECN's lose liquidity on news events as well. I am disappointed at Oanda's server crash on Friday, though. Not a good sign.
I'm not sure there's any prevention against Stops getting hit due to spread widening it must happen with all brokers. I don't use Stops so don't have the problem what I don't like are those sudden revesals that occur for seemingly no good reason where the price spikes up or down for 10 or 20 pips then goes back to where it was this is an old thread with a chart illustrating an NFP release - futures v spot ' 6E vs eurusd nfp release (news) trading ' http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=172655 this is a recent thread related to the Oanda platform. I didn't experience last Friday's outage - was it universal or limited to some users only ? I may have been sleeping when it occurred so don't know about it Oanda's platform is quite old - that's to say it should have all the bugs worked out but it's dependant on the Java platform, and as such between Jave code changes and what Oanda presumably may have to re-code, there might be some instability from time to time - tho there ought not to be ' Oanda FXTrade Unreliable ' http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=210889 another matter is ISPs; the previous Zen-Fire data feed outage was related to some only, of the ISPs Zen-Fire was using for data transmission: ' Concerns about Mirus ' http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=205036 the above is a problem I have with Globex trading that if and when my, their's, the exchange's feed goes down I have - so far as I know - no way to exit a trade - unlike fx brokers where - unless the phones go down - I can and have phoned the broker - Oanda - to have them close my trade - no problem also with a multi-branch broker such as FXCM - Alpari ? - one can access one's account via a branch office if the office where one's account is located is unable to be contacted - this happened several years ago with the NE brownout that not only knocked out power but also landlines and cell phones
I downloaded the tick data from Dukascopy's site (available for free) into excel, and made an excel chart. The chart type is "lines on 2 axes." I took out the connecting lines for the bid/ask points for clarity.