OANDA Discussion

so the high and low of the candle that appears in the lower left corner is the mid price?

Yes. If the high of the candle is, let's say 1.3500 then the bid would be 1.34995 and the ask would be 1.35005 if you take a spread of 1.0 pips.

Thanks, Xaron.

Is there a material that explains how to load this ascii data on to chart window and run it with my indicators.

Thanks again.

TS

I am done with OANDA. To many issues and more seem to keep cropping up.

1. Platform disconnects and will not reconnect. Server busy and other issues relating to using the platform to manage trades. I have tried the web based, desktop and mobile. In my case the issues have created a lack of confidence and that has caused me to hedge off my positions which is a b*tch to unwind properly. It seems to happen every couple of weeks.

2. When the above happens - don't waste your time calling - If your down because of an OANDA problem, so is support they will close a position manually (honor a price quoted to you) if you have the ticket number and size. But it is a paper transaction - they can't access the account.

3. Various things have shown up that remove or add trades and positions.

4. Data spikes that creates incorrect fills can take days or weeks to resolve. For me this leaves my risk management in question because you do not know what they are going to do. Have not had one for a couple of weeks - but i was getting them about every 5 days.

If your learning how to trade and your trading for a penny a pip or less - where results do not matter - to get your feet wet it isn't a bad setup BECAUSE you can open with any dollar amount and trade any dollar amount...ANY. For me that was the hook. I wanted to reinvests profits following a model that had at times odd dollar amounts.

It has been a good experience in terms of confirming my risk controls as being prudent. I am just speeding up the process and removing OANDA from being a firm I will do business with.

So now I am opening accounts with 2 brokers in different parts of the world so that I can manage things under any situation should they go down. I HOPE 2 will be enough!!

BR

Trailing stops feature is already on, in the live accounts

Yes..finally good job.

GREAT!

Just seen that this morning... Finally !!!

And it has allready saved me some money so them saying that they did not thought that it would not increase gain was BS...

I dont need anything else now. For me it's just perfect.

hello guys,

at what amount of money/pip would you say does the risk start to trade with oanda? at what amount do they start to influence your orders etc.?

right now I have like 20 cent/pip so I don't think that will draw attetion yet,
but when should I think about changing to an non-retail broker`?

Here is what Oanda says:
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...34#post2113834

Oanda is not going to manipulate prices to come after your account. The attached post explains why after a certain size, your execution will be a little slower. It also states the size they can handle instantly. You are far, far away from that size. Your account will draw no attention and won't be singled out and manipulated.

My biggest single entry was once 500,000 units. Up to that I had no issues. I tried to place 5, 50, 500, 5k, 50k and 500k limit orders. All were filled identically.

If ForexSaviour's Link is correct, i doubt they give a shit about < 1 mio. orders. 338 Bio. / Month is ~15 Bio. per day so that's pretty much peanuts.

It's not the size of your trade which matters, it's how you trade. Even trading 2k can put you on their radar if you're consistently exploiting an inefficiency in a marketmaker's system or price feed, they don't take kindly to being screwed

Its not economical to have employees go after 2K nickel-players. You know how much 1 employee costs the firm per month? Not to mention reputational damage that would cause.

Also, i doubt if they are aware of an 'exploiter' that they tamper with pricing or their stops. But people had their accounts closed by Oanda. For example, people that exploited latency on news-releases - back in the day, when that still worked. Close the account and be done with them, its the only sensible way to go about 'problematic clients'. Its a cost-effective, instant solution that doesn't expose them to reputational or legal (nfa arbitration) troubles. There are a few threads on the oanda forum from people that had their accounts closed.

Closing an account is a last resort because they would lose revenue, there are much better ways to dissuade a client from exploiting latency such as delayed execution and filling at their actual market price, in effect a sort of automated manual execution where their system checks the quote before filling the order, it's nothing to do with "tamper with pricing or their stops".

They don't have to dedicate a member of staff to detect and deal with these people as they have algorithms which manage everything, 2k or 200k it doesn't make any difference. It's a bit like saying stores don't bother about nickel-shoplifters!

And where exactly have you gained insight to these operational details?

They're not really operational details, it's basic information which any marketmaker will give you freely if you ask them.

I think what people need to try and do is get away from the bucketshop conspiracy theories which are propagated around the net. Accepted there are a few rogue brokers out there but the majority of mainstream shops play it fairly straight, they don't need to cheat, an alleged 95% lose money without any interference from their broker!

Personally, I think the honest thing to do would simply be to close their acct.

It's up front, clear, and everyone knows exactly what happened.

Brokers who do kinky things(such as profiling users and treating them differently based on those profiles) just breed distrust amongst current and potential customers.

That being said, I've often seen Oanda's chart prices look really weird compared to chart prices I've seen on other systems, so while their prices are great, I do approach them with some caution. You also have to be careful about the delays in execution that routinely pop up in their client.

I agree about the conspiracy theories, but why make one up then? I doubt Oanda will (or has ever) admitted to your "automated manual execution". I also doubt that it is necessary at all or that they do it. They just fill everyone at the price they deem fit (which is competitive, most of the time) - or they don't, in case it exceeds the order-bounds setting.

lol, well exactly!

So if they've got someone consistently and sucessfully exploiting latency the solution is simple, when the order arrives at their server it will check that the ticket price matches their existing market price, and then fill, in other words automated manual execution as opposed to instant fill. They probably already do that for every order, the difference would be adding a fractional delay in filling the exploiters order. The milliseconds it take to process the order is sufficient to negate any benefit that latency might have had for the trader, and ultimately it becomes pointless to even try exploiting latency because the trader knows what will happen.

No need to close an account and definitely lose a client, if the client doesn't like it he will leave of his own volition with no hard feelings, he's not going to be pissed because the broker caught him out, if anything he'll have respect that the broker is on the ball. Who knows, he may even stay!