you don't understand, you are not talking to another trader cabletrader is a poor boy paid to post good about Oanda He can't afford 10 k to open an IB account
All that matters... IDEALPRO is a clean, straight-up ECN... And I get price improvement on about 20% of Limit Orders... Everything else is window dressing... And you can build what you need proprietary. I've seen countless hi-volume traders and firms... Stick with IB for years and pile up the profits. And I've seen countless losers with 5K accounts... Complain about shit like charts and Customer Service... While missing the Big Picture entirely. When you make 500 trades/day... Customer Service doesn't matter... Because you just absorb the odd, strange fill... And keep grinding profits day after day.
You cant really go wrong with either firm in my opinion. I have been a long term Hotspot(and oanda) client, up until they went downhill in the last quarter of last year (pretty much the same thing like IB up until then). Fills between Oanda and HS were much the same, maybe 1 pip here and there difference, all in all. I wish both IB and oanda would ditch their p.o.s. java clients. A little native windows application, just displaying quotes and doing order-entry in a convenient way would do just fine. Without charts and whatever useless crap they pack into their bloated monstrosities they call a trading-platform and cause loads of problems. Sometimes i think these forms are some sort of employment program for failed IT interns or something.
I really, really wish they don't. Online trading platforms have enough technical risks, why add to that something that Microsoft stole->regurgitated->"integrated" into their bloatware->uses as trojan to keep tabs on you? 'charts are useless'...