OANDA Discussion

My platform crashed for like 20 seconds. At least the crashes are getting shorter and shorter.

I waited all night last night to get my big long gold fill and the freaking platform wouldn't give me ANY. For what seemed like forever.

Has anyone else experienced this? Right at the bottom, which I found curious and interesting? And for ten dollars UP. Nothing. This pisses me right off.

Are they a market maker or a broker, or does it not matter, are they at the mercy of whomever?

I was having issues placing and closing orders and I cleared out the Java cache / temp files and things seem to be working a lot better. Might want to give that a try, if you haven't already.

Anyone seeing a lot of disconnects on the Oanda platform(MT4 and the regular). such a pain in the a$$

No

Posted by Michael Greenberg at the following link:

http://forexmagnates.com/us-forex-br...rt-for-q1-2011

"This is the first profitability report for 2011 and there are several interesting changes since last quarter’s US forex brokers profitability report: first of all IG Markets is no longer in the list as it is no longer operating directly in the US while Tradestation Forex will join this list only next quarter.

Second notable change is the drop in Oanda’s client profitability. Oanda had to remove accounts which are only paid interest from the calculation as this was a new requirement set out by CFTC. This resulted in Oanda’s profitability number dropping from 51% in Q3 2010 to 43.5% in Q4 2010 and now to 38%. Oanda has also removed almost 20,000 accounts from the total number of accounts and now shows slightly less than 30,000 accounts – still by far the largest broker in the US. This means that interest-only accounts are no less than 40% out of total Oanda’s accounts.

GFT now is the most ‘profitable’ broker in the US – this means that on average its clients are more profitable than others. Whether this actually means that clients have better chances at being profitable when trading with the ‘top’ brokers in this list – is a topic for a very long and perhaps a philosophical debate.

Oanda’s updated number of accounts also changes the total number of active (per CFTC’s definition) accounts in the US. Oanda has recaculated the number of its active accounts retroactively which puts the total number of US accounts in Q4 2010 at 107,983 (excluding IG Markets) and the current number of US accounts at 108,603 – a growth of only 0.5%. Biggest gainers in this report are Oanda and FXCM which jointly gained more than what FXDD, Interbank FX, FX Solutions, FX Club and Gain Capital lost.

As usually Advanced Markets stands out with an extremely low numbers of accounts – only 50 this quarter, however we now finally have an explanation for this – its clients are the biggest in the industry in terms of average balance. In February Advanced Markets reported $1.7 million in client capital which divided by 50 accounts results in an astonishing average $35,448 balance per account – almost 7 times higher than the US industry average of $5270.

Perhaps the most remarkable figure in this report is the average growth in overall clients profitability. Almost all brokers have reported better profitability numbers in this quarter comparing to the previous one, and this is in line with my predictions. On overall clients were 2% more profitable this quarter than in the previous one (to exclude Advanced Markets effect we can use a weighted average which would give an increase of 3% in profitability instead of 2%). Comparisons such as the one I’m making here is one of the reasons behind this – brokers are trying to improve their image and as a result their profitability results are improving quarter-on-quarter. Perhaps this is what CFTC had in mind when they introduced this quarterly profitability reporting requirement."

Thanks for reporting Shephrd.

Well well well. Look who dropped to 2nd place.

Advertise THAT oanda.

Are there really only 108K people retail traders in the US? You'd think it was in the millions, I guess not a lot of people are active at any one time.

Yeah, consistently active retail traders aren't as many as you'd think. Certainly NOT in the millions.

there's other markets to trade in the U.S.

We're talking forex.

Give that guy a little break. He is a bit slow.

Now lookie here: a new report.

% Profit times Active Users = ???

Why not tell us how much that is, in dollars. :-D

Would be great to know how much money those retailers are moving around.

After new york close oanda has widened its spread,
trading is not possible under this circumstances.

geppy 70 pips, eur/jpy 35, swissy 30, fiber 25, aud/usd 25 while other broke have 5-7 pips spread.

this is unbelievable. I can´t trade with these huge spread.

I'm definitely not seeing these outrageous spreads on my platform.

Because on MT a point is 0.1 pips, so actually GBP/JPY spread is 7 and not 70.

yeah it's 70 'pipettes', not pips.

Switch to MBT, they are paying me commission on my trades.

It's quite unlikely your spread was 70 pips, but rather 7 pips.

You seem to be reading it right from the indi that is on your screen: most of them are programmed incorrectly, having been produced when 5-digit quotes were a rarity.

With a 5-digit MT4 price, you need to divide the spread it gives you by 10.

Regardless, you should validate your claim by bringing up the order window or view the market rates window (CTRL-M); your claim would mean that one would have been buying GBPJPY at 135, and selling it at 135.7 - the biggest, worst and most unregulated bucket shops don't have that as the case, either in prime or low liquidity times.

It is 'misconceptions' like this that lead people to rile against their brokers, while the truth is their operating facts are wrong.

Forget Oanda.