you should absolutely NOT trade with Oanda at least as a primary broker. anybody who sets their own bid/offers will ultimately screw you - that's the way the business work. on top of that they charge you interest on each side of pair separately, i.e. if you are e.g. short EUR/USD and short USD/CNY making you flat in USD you are still charged the bid/offer spread in interest for USD - ridiculous. for whatever pair you can access the interbank market you should trade it there. for instance IB let's you trade all major currency crosses. there is an exception when Oanda is helpful and for which i rarely use it. they offer some exotic pairs (like Eastern Europe) and you can take position over the weekend usually for Friday's close even if there are significant fundamental news... p.s. and with respect to spread on EUR/USD it is usually 0.5 with IB - of course better than 0.9 with Oanda which takes 0.4 home.
I'm not an Oandian. It's just that jlnv or what his name is seems to be the only one who had this kind of thing. If this would be a continuous case then there would be a lot more traders who would have witnessed the same thing. If there would be more you would have read about it. And you would have a lot of noise. And you would have an NFA investigation. Nothing there is. jlnv sounds like a wannabe to me. Now he is trading with a metatrader bucketshop. Look at his elitetrader history. Funny. To your claim why I've registered here. elitetrader isn't the top of the world. And if you haven't notice you also had a first post a few days or weeks back. Jlnv put the link to this thread into a Oanda message board section. That's why I read about it. Otherwise Elitetrader is not that interesting
Oanda is a MMer and as such offers no marketplace. They are not simply functioning in a clearing capacity or offering STP. They take the risk on each ticket. That being said, there was a lot of edge in the past on their touch options and synthetic Euro digitals. The markets are no longer mis-priced, but they are still competitive with markets made by ICAP, etc.
Saying someone who is trading through Metatrader scam software of a small bucketshop. Never heard of virtual dealer plugin? You have proved nothing. You can't even provide facts just eye witnessing. I don't trust eyes.
Jrlnv, tell me, your friend (or is it you who is your friend) had a six-figure account? Where is he now trading with? Also at interbank fx?
well, fair enough. but the commission is still lower than Oanda's 0.4+ mark up.... you would have to make trades below USD63K trade value to have Oanda cheaper - and that is only during quiet trading hours. when the market gets volatile Oanda increases the 0.4 mark up...
No, it depends on market liquidity and depends on what banks provide to Oanda. What you are saying is simply not the case that if there is volatility then there is a spread shift. That's BS.
Marketmaker or not (and Oanda is a marketmaker, no way around that), i don't really care. The only thing that counts is competitive pricing and good execution. I'm staring at quotes from different providers pretty much all day, and my opinion is that Oanda can easily compete with the rest of the bunch on both accounts, including IB. About the swaps, its true that they dont net the ccy amounts for swap calculation like IB (only on a per pair basis), but their rates are way more competitve than IBs, even with IBs higher tiers.