see my above question to Steve_IB, well he answered in a PM this to me " Nick, We can allow more than $5m per order. However, we need to see who the client is, how they are trading, what they are trading, etc. Then we can make sure the client knows what they are doing, and understands how the market works. Unfortunately, the FX market seems to attract the least ethical traders and often the least knowledgeable traders. We've had some amazing attempts by clients trying to exploit "free money" opportunities without realising what they are actually doing. Even things as basic as buying the spot, and selling the futures, thinking they're making the difference in price... then programming an auto-trading API to do it... Steve " Steve, What do you care , how or what they are trading ? What is supposed to be non-ethical ?! And why you answer a public question in a private way ?
From what I hear, people were making too much money trading with Felix, and Oanda started closing accounts. I contacted felix about this, and he suggested trading with lots less than a million, even as low as 500,000
This is typical of promoting a trading style that benefits the broker rather than the trader. It would be nice to see a broker who is interested in the success of the trader over the long term. If they were they would not be requiring all these round turns per day, etc. I am an active trader but I will never trade on the short term time frame and am on a mission to help others to see the benefits of not trading the short term. Therefore, you are right that IB will not be on my short list. I also do not understand how a trader could enter a trade and close it in a manner that would be unethical. Perhaps he means "profitable".
I like OANDA too, but I don't like this list. The OP was asking about what makes OANDA different. The answers, as I see them: Effectively infinite granularity of position sizing. This is number 1 by a long way. It is actually revolutionary. The traditional "lot" and "mini lot" is only appropriate for people with accounts in the 7 figures +, and even they might find use for this granularity. If you understand anything about money management, then you understand that giving people with accounts less than say, 50K, no opportunity to divide trades at smaller intervals than 100K or 10K is horrible. We have enough disadvantages as retail traders without having to deal with this! Continuous interest payment, by the second. This is a much, much better model than "rollover" and such nonsense. If carry trading is part of your strategy or at least something you look at it, this is very useful and elegant. Low spreads Compared to other mass market retail brokers, they are low (please correct me if I'm wrong..). 1.5 Euro, 1.8 USDJPY, 2.8 Cable etc. Spreads on many crosses are very reasonable too; EURJPY 2.3, EURGBP 1.5 EURCHF 2 etc. Note they use pipettes. Recent news spikes have become very large on Cable, but they are stuck at a reasonable 10 pips on other pairs. For everyday positioning, they offer spreads that are better than the few other retail brokers I've looked at. No lower limit on account size This is useful both for people who have very little money to put into trading and for those who want to experiment before committing capital. As far as I am aware, you can open an account with $100 or even $50 or less, and you can trade with individual currency units e.g. long 20EUR against USD. Sounds crazy but apart from anything else it does bridge the realism gap between emotionless papertrading and real life losing 5% of your stake. Pairs This is one point where I'd agree with Colombo's list; they offer quite a few exotics which is nice for longer term plays, eg HUF ZAR and MXN are interesting for the carry quite apart from anything else, also Asians like THB and SGD, HKD are at least marginally interesting at times. They also do XAU and XAG nowadays. Provision of real time historical data Recently they have provided users with accounts over $1000 the opportunity to download tick data for majors going back 3 years, at no charge. This provides for very realistic backtesting. I don't have any idea whether other retail brokers provide that kind of thing for free. Another little detail: you can trade at the weekend, they don't shut down the server (or at least rarely). That can be useful in rare cases. If you look at all this stuff together you start to see an overall philosophy; difficult to put into words, but something to do with removing artificial barriers...
He did get smart however. I guess Felix is experimenting with a different type of swing trading now, with some guy named Matt. Does this kind of trading work well with Oanda?
Excellent list, waxwing. No one yet mentioned Oanda sub-accounts, linked for nearly-instant online transfers yet fully independent otherwise. Hard to overestimate their value for: - managing more than one strategy; - managing more than one time frame; - applying different money management; - live-money, real-time experimentation; - the establishment and maintenance of a verifiable pure single-strategy track record, without restricting your discretionary capability. It's a shame so few dealers offer sub-accounts. On the other hand, like most, Oanda still lacks a multi-client interface, a serious drawback.
Multi client will be available in a few weeks according to a post by an OANDANIAN on the forum recently.
Thanks for this excellent post. I am practically sold if they just had higher leverage. I realize many people recommend not using high leverage but unless you are losing you will always make more money with higher leverage everything else being equal. The people who warn against high leverage are all basing their reason on the expectation of consistently losing.