Virtually nobody is making money on Oanda accounts

Ohh my god i cant believe my eyes Oanda are pure scammers, i had 4 winning trades on the go they all spiked into bigger profit and Oanda just increased their spreads 5 fold now there all losing trades im closing my account WHAT A RIPP OFF

It might be that you have your bounds set to be too tight for a fast moving market. If you are using MT4, you can still access your account settings in the fxTrade Platform. When you log in to fxTrade, select the sub-account you have set up for MT4 and look under Tools>User Preferences>Trading and see if you have "Enable Bounds by Default" at the bottom checked. If it is checked, uncheck it or increase the "Default Bounds" parameter at the top so that your bounds aren't preventing you from executing orders. You can search online for a more detailed explanation of how bounds work. Theoretically, this feature can protect you from accidentally entering into a trade if the market is moving too fast. (It's a lot easier not to get into a bad trade than to try to get out of one!)



Hope this is helpful.

I personally know of more than 4 accounts that are consistently profitable with OANDA, so what's really going on?

Trading is, without spreads, a zero-sum game. With spreads, it's less than a zero-sum game. This means that every time you lose money, someone else makes money, minus the broker spread/fee. With this in mind, an individual trader isn't just trading against other traders at their broker, they're trading against every other trader around the world.

So on average, everyone is losing money on 50% to 52% (the extra 2% for broker fees) of their trades. If you have a bunch of new or amateur traders who lose 90%, others are earning their losses.

Who are these best traders earning your losses? Where are they? Is their information public on Forex performance tracking sites? Here are my thoughts:

Who?
The best Forex traders have pattern recognition skills that put them on the autism spectrum (Asperger's). Think Rain Man. They're happy sitting alone in a room staring at the "beautiful" charts all day. Every day. This is who you're trading against.

Where?
The stratospherically good traders have set up hedge funds within which they can trade, where they are the main investor, so they can get around paying taxes annually on their earnings.

Publicly Visible on Tracking Sites?
Not a chance. When you're really good at trading, you can make more money trading your own money (or fund's money) than you can by training others or selling systems. It's the old "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." You only need to be public on those sites if you have something to sell to other traders.

Conclusion?
The top 20% of traders are taking money from the bottom 80%. The bottom 80% are skewed toward trading with brokers who count on them blowing away their accounts with too much leverage.

OANDA doesn't allow much leverage. EURUSD, USDCAD, EURCAD, are the only non-pegged pairs which can be leveraged up to 50:1. JPY pairs top out at 25:1. GBP pairs are at 20:1 (since Brexit). All other majors are at 33:1. Most independent (non-bank employee) professionals don't go above 30:1 leverage, so OANDA is just fine for them.

More important for full-time traders is that OANDA has a solid reputation. When your trading capital is your only/main source of income, you want it to be someplace safe. I believe this explains why OANDA has one of the highest percentages of profitable traders among brokers.

Plus, once you meet certain criteria, OANDA bumps you to a preferred status which gets you a dedicated account rep and better spreads. I know someone who was able to use this service to request changes to their mobile apps, which they made (to the benefit of all traders).

Every time I get frustrated with them, I do an assessment of the competition and decide to stay.

yeah to that.