Yea precisely why I like mental stops instead. What did you mean with keeping sundry amounts with IB? Dont you just have one account with them for all forex pairs?
They don't convert everything back to USD which is what my account is in, they convert to the nearest $10 or something, I didn't figure it out exactly. The last trade with IB was a USDCAD and when I closed it I had a few Canadian dollars balance. I suppose I could have left it but I converted it using their currency exchange facility and got levied a commission for the transaction. I trade over 30 pairs so imagine the mess if I start having an assortment of sundry currency balances. Because of this I use IB for everything but FX. With Oanda it all immediately converts to USD when I close the trade.
Interesting! "MarketDelta now makes it now possible to plot a Footprint for FX markets. THIS IS A GAME CHANGER FOR FOREX TRADERS! Prior to this, forex traders only had price to trade from. Now they will have the transparency to see where tick volume is occurring within the bar, any time frame bar..." https://footprintchart.com/see-inside-the-chart-1/2012/02/14/forex-footprints-revealing-opportunties
On the H1 chart USDJPY today August 25, 2017.The price is still stuck in the resistance area while stochastic shows bearish indication, so today the bias is still bearish. For trading strategies based on technical analysis today, you can look for a confirmation of sell signal inside the reference area at the range 109.542, with potential targets up to 108.626.
Very interesting. I trade futures through Sierra Charts (using IB) and have absolutely no complaints with the platform. I would like to get back into forex because I want to start learning to hold positions longer term and I want to cut my teeth on tiny lot sizes. I have opened an account with Oanda but I was not aware that they are compatible with Sierra. How did you get that configuration to work? Edit: Ok I reread your post and I see you dont execute through Sierra. Im busy waiting for a live chat with IB right now to find out how to trade forex through them.
I'll preface by saying that I have an account at OandA and I have an account at IB. They don't care about you. They care about the total balance of their portfolios. If any one currency pair gets too lopsided in terms of buys versus sells they counter-trade with their liquidity providers. We the clients are irrelevant. Just like a good bookie lays off action if the betting on the SuperBowl becomes too one sided. They keep their internal book at even and take a skim from commissions and interest at no risk. OandA makes money from our commissions. They make interest on the trades in play. They make interest on overnights. BUT as a bonus, since 90% of the clients lose in the long term and since they are taking the other side of those trades, all that goes straight into their pockets. OandA appears to be one of the brokers that has realized that playing it completely legit as a market maker to retail clients makes you a fortune and no need to worry about jail and fines. Now let's thinks this through just a bit and pretend we are in their shoes. A wealthy retail client, such as yourself, puts $30 million through, they will not care, their systems just balance out the risk and send any overage to an LP and they take the commission and interest on $30 million. But the real secret sauce is in the fact it helps them. With that amount you just became a de facto liquidity provider to them, and they get paid by you, to take your money, unlike the Tier 2 providers that would charge them for use of $30 million. They would use your money as the offset to their other clients and get paid rather than paying out. You would be LOVED by them, not a target. Bit of reality. If you are an American (which your profile indicates) a spot fx account at IB is a minimum of $10 million to open an account. That fact tends to stop conversations. If you have that available then I'm sure an IB rep will be very happy to chat with you. The differences in trading on IB to OandA are huge. No point in getting into it all. Think of a high school sports team versus a professional team. It will be deer in the headlights for the first while, there is a learning curve, trade small and careful, or better yet, on demo until you get a feel for the platform. If you have outgrown OandA and want a true ECN broker where you pay a real commission not one built into a marked up spread than start your due diligence. IB is not the only choice, but then you get into the issue of brokers claiming to be ECN's and they are not. If you have the capital and a proven record of trading then moving to an ECN is an obvious choice. But please do your due diligence on whoever you chose. It does open up trading opportunities that do not exist in OandA. Your statistics on the global spot fx market (taken from wikipedia) are wrong. There are better sources such a Bloomberg, various central bank websites, the SEC, legitimate sources. Overall spot fx is around 4 trillion a day, the retail component world wide is 200 billion. Only the imbalance of buys and sells from OandA gets into that number. If they have perfectly balanced the buys and sells, of say the EURUSD, then ZERO goes into the global market. If OandA started to move the fx spot price on their own, in order to steal client money, by quoting a price that is not the real market price, I would be the happiest person in the world. I could get rich with no risk. ???? I could arbitrage the OandA price against the true market price, they can't leave it as a fake price forever. FREE MONEY! GIMME SOME! It is because I can do that, I know that they don't. I remember reading about a case in the UK recently where a couple from Eastern Europe did precisely that. With no surprise FXCM was the broker. The couple paid for a faster data feed from another provider and then traded on FXCM's platform which is delayed (wonder why, /sarcasm). FXCM took them to court and won an order that the had to repay the money, it was considered cheating. Oh, the ironies abound. THERE FINALLY FOUND THE LINK https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-460-000-fight-with-retired-bulgarian-teacher I don't understand this part about the "exact data" that you need. If it is in reference to the share of the global forex market then something is not right. Our assets are like a grain of sand on a vast beach. If you are trying to hint that your assets are even higher, then terrific, at 1.5 Billion you can get an account at GS or one of the other true major investment banks and dealers. (to qualify for an ISDA, not just an account) But that is another world. If you are referring to data used by OandA for FXLab on balance volumes, volume data, Autochartist and such other features. Then I can only offer my own personal observation. I have spent a great deal of time acquiring data that I use for creating the probability simulations that I use for trading. I have found my data to be different from that which is offered in say Autochartist. I trade with my own data and my own methodology. See how polite I was in saying that. As @Xela already said you need to look at the futures market to get a true sense of volume. Depending on your strategy something as simple as the Commitment of Traders Report from the CFTC might be enough, but it is only weekly and it's release lags by 3 days. http://www.cftc.gov/marketreports/commitmentsoftraders/index.htm I have a disclaimer somewhere in this forum but it is getting to cumbersome to keep appeasing the oafs and the trolls. Essentially don't do anything I said, you are right and I am wrong, and I really don't care about you at all, there are probably some typo's in here just grow up about it, etc etc etc