Post from the Oanda Forum: KH Senior Member Member # 5089 posted March 19, 2006 05:24 AM Profile for KH Just noticed that trading gold and silver requires 4% margin? In FX Game the margin requirement was 2%. Is this a bug? (The same bug had happened when CAD/JPY was introduced last year.) As I said, I'm still number crunching (or I may not be doing something right) but for some reason the apparent difference in units available doesn't change as yet between 20:1 and 50:1 with gold and silver. x
From Oanda: Mar 19, 2006 Gold and Silver trading We are pleased to announce that trading in gold (XAU/USD) and silver (XAG/USD) have been added to FXTrade. Expect their spreads to come down from their typical weekend spreads on the morning of Monday, March 20, 2006. I guess we'll see tomorrow. Right now they are 600-wide for silver and 250-wide for gold. x
Well, the way I feel about it, if Oanda can swing currencies and now gold and silver... what is stopping them from offering access to bonds, wheat and oil? I know more about the subterranean gasses of Jupiter than I do about the futures market but, on face value, they have gold and silver now that is generally traded in futures, right? So why not offer corn, wheat, soybean, oil and bonds by the unit as well? If someone knows why that's impossible, please post. But if it can be done at all, Oanda will pull it off. Imagine buying/selling OIL in the spot market by a penny or dime worth at a time. Ex
Spot (not futures) gold and silver are also traded on EBS, the system the big banks use for trading currencies. So there's a big difference for oanda in offering spot gold/silver and wheat or bonds More info: http://www.ebs.com/products/metals.asp
sKaLpZ, 1 unit of XAU/USD = 1 Oz of gold and 1 unit of XAG/USD = 1 Oz of silver. You're off by 5-6 orders of magnitude... no big deal. 2% initial margin / 50:1 leverage available for both since 1 pm on Sunday the 19th, quickly corrected from 4% / 25:1 for the first few hours.