OANDA is cheating?

Hello everybody!

Just now I had a long position on AUD/USD and stoploss at 7654. After the 21:30 news on AUD the price went down a little, but NEVER hit 7654. Even + spread 3 pips = 7657. But price never went lower 7663. I was watching the candle and my stop disappeared right before my very eyes!
Could someone explain this? Somebody had the same experience?

JBB,

Not sure what happened here, but I've had the price come .5 away from my stop loss and it not get hit. Sometimes the price moves so fast it will hit your stops without you seeing it. Time to move on to the next trades.

Happy Trading ....

I noticed something weird today too. It's like oanda increased the spread but the software did not show at the time. I placed an order at the time with a stop loss less than 10, and when the price cross my order the spread was 2 on my computer, but my order was cancelled. It was after about 5-10 sec later the spread became 10 on my computer. So I guess that was a software glitch at the time somehow shown wrong spread while the actual spread was already 10, which is normal for AUD/USD when news comes out.

For your case, the spread must have been 10 already even though it was shown as 3 on your computer.

First check to see what happened.....hmmmm ..... could it have been the news which caused increased volitility? which caused the 20 pip sread, which was wide enough to trip your stop?

i came here looking for info on brokers too. i just tried to trade the aussie retail sales on ODLsecurities.com they are a very high volume broker and i received a requote 20 points away from my ideal entry. what i'm thinking about what happened on Oanda and ODL is the aussie rate decision came through and thinned the brokers out so they purposely or maybe naturally dried up liquidity. brokers do not like rate changes as there are many people that straddle. this is one time that straddles almost always play out well on both sides of the trade.

my question for the people interested in getting to the bottom of this is: how many lots were you trading at the time? i was trying to trade 50 lots and i have already asked my IB and my broker so expect info tomorrow at which point i will return here and inform everyone what i find. at this point i'm guessing my problem is due to my volume and a poor liquidity situation on the aussie/usd
another question that i have had for a long time is: how many lots can you trade at oanda during news? i know their max is 100 but does anyone know if you can get executed with 100 lots?
the other obvious question is who does anyone recommend? i'm hearing more guys go to ECN's to trade news and i advised against it as i was slipped many times by COESfx and i have vowed to never go back there. but i'm interested to hear of others that are having good luck.

thanks and i'll get back tomorrow
jeff swanson

Check the min max charts they will show you the bounds the prices hit....in this case they appear to have hit your stop. this is the Oanda 15 min chart.

http://www.picfury.com/1h/opps-1-th.JPG

I edited out the newbie statement because your right it was a little over the top, sorry about that.

Well, yes, if it was change of spread...I understand. But it definitely didn't change on my software. It was 3 pips as long as I was there till about 22:15.

Interestingly when I took the screen shoot this morning, the price was exactly at the same spot.

If you look on the oanda spreads website you can see a rediculous spike in spreads I'm assuming around that time. (I can't tell you exactly since I don't know what time zone your oanda is in.)


http://fxtrade.oanda.com/spreads/rec....shtml#aud_usd

The news time spreads on the aususd on Oanda are obscenely gigantic. I trade with them and I won't even trade that currency pair anymore. So far, I have not seen that happening....... as much...... on other pairs, but they still significantly widen even the eurusd during news.

I can see how they justify the 10 pip spreads, but 20+ pip spreads just seem like stop hunting/straddle hunting. If this practice spreads to other currency pairs to that extent, I guess I will be looking for another broker. I hope Oanda realizes that they will lose business that way. I am sure they don't care about my crappy little account;however, if you are trading huge numbers of lots as described by the jswanson post in this thread..... I would guess your opinion would matter to them.

good luck.
sw

JBB, you didn't get what johnedoe said: you need to use the minmax chart to see the spread. You do understand that if you're long you're stopped with the bid price (the lower price), right?

The minmax chart shows you the extremes between bid and ask. What you have in your screenshot is a typical case of a trade stopped out while spreads are high. The candle does not touch your stop because candle only shows midpoint, not the extremes.

This issue comes up way too often it should be explained somewhere..

Jeff Swanson, 10 million executes on Oanda just like any other trade, no waiting. It's only a single trade limitation. If you have the funds you can gun orders as quickly as you can.

I am new here so i dont know if anybody has mentioned this broker before. I use Internaxx.lu for my EUR/USD and NZD/xxx trading. i've just looked at the target spreed on AUS/USD and it is 2 pips, the bid ask chart for today looks to have been fairly stable.

Thank you very much everyone. Great explanation

Yes! Oanda is reputable. I trade announcements on the very minute the long candlestick appears. No slippage. Just steal a few pips within minutes. I do that all the time. I trade USD/JPY though......so the highest I've seen is maybe 5 pip spread due to volatility. Acceptable to me.