Items Tagged With oanda

The April trading contest is at the tail end with only 3 real trading days left and the mighty have fallen.  QLaun who led most of last week and the first couple of days this week has fallen from the top.  

 
The top 6 traders sorted by portfolio returns have maximum drawdowns between -4.20 and -17.99.  I found details of some other contests and how they determined an acceptable maximum drawdown level.  

Acceptable maximum drawdown level for aggressive trading should not exceed 15%.

Acceptable maximum drawdown level for conservative trading should not exceed 10%.

Acceptable maximum drawdown level for fund managers should not exceed 5%.

So if I were to use these figures, I would rank contestants as of today this way: 

TOP THREE AGGRESSIVE TRADERS

1. Dumb Luck +24.26%
2. MartinFXUY +14.66%
3. RotcaX +12.52% 

TOP THREE CONSERVATIVE TRADERS 

1. Dumb Luck +24.26%
2. MartinFXUY +14.66%
3. RotcaX +12.52% 

TOP THREE MONEY MANAGERS

1. RotcaX +12.52%
2. Milton +2.91%
3. Netman +1.86% 

Good job guys.  I'm not doing too well.  I'm at -3.05%.  The only thing I have going for me is that my maximum drawdown is -1.17. 

Brent from over at Forex2Stay has decided to rid himself of Oanda.  He decided to go with an STP/ECN broker, EFX Group or MB Trading.   

Thanks to Forex Rookie for his comments.  I feel his pain.  I have had more than the usual disconnects from Oanda this week.  Their IT folks better find out the root cause this weekend.  I can't say whether Oanda would have refunded my money if it was more than 16 pips but they're probably not even aware I have this blog.  I wouldn't hesitate to throw the weight of this site around if any of you or I have issues that we feel are unfair.

I think oanda only refunded your money cuz you have this HUGE blog and they don't want the bad publicity...lol:D...Anyways yesterday i think we all experienced problems with oanda, i had a personal experience of my own.

Yesterday At BOE news release i was in a USD/JPY trade that was in profit of 130+ Pips. due to the unexpected resuts it fell 50 pips where i decided to take profit before things got worse, So i pulled the trigger to close the order for 84 pips, and in that split second i was disconnected from the server, When i finally got back into my account i was in profit of 111 pips..LAMO....I exited the trade this morning for a lesser profit of 90 pips....The moral of the story???? IDK..lol..I just wanted to tell my story.

17 traders have already joined.  It would be great if you did too. What's in it for you? 

It's a chance to _________. 

1. check out Oanda's trading platform
2. add a little more incentive to trade that demo account like it's real
3. compete for pride
4. have your name mentioned on the front page of this blog (big deal, right)
5. get back into demo trading to try that new strategy you've been meaning to forward test

Check out details on how to join at http://www.forexproject.com/Forex_Contests/

Join within the next couple of hours.  I have to approve the contestants before midnight today but I won't be around later tonight because it's New Year's Eve.  Contest starts at midnight on January 1st.  If I don't talk to you before then, have a Happy New Year. 

Click on the image on the top right to see the results from the last contest.

I received an email from a visitor this morning who had this to report.

I have been following your blog for a while. I enjoy your posts. Interesting and informative. I just came across a forex broker - no spread (practically) and $5 per lot commission. This beats the 3-5 pip spread for most pairs (i.e. $30 - 50). Please check out Mbtrading.com at tell me what you think.

I don't know if he/she is affiliated with MBTrading but nevertheless, I looked at the site and responded back with the following email:

It seems like it's a flat $5 USD for every $100,000 traded.  So if you trade 10 mini-lots (for a total of 100K), the total commission is only $5.  The only thing is 3DForex, which is MBTrading's forex incorporation doesn't have a lot of excess capital.  Neither does MB Trading...  I tend to want to put my money into Forex brokers who have at least over 20 million.   3DForex has an adjusted net capital of $544,000 with an excess of only $44,000 as of November 2006. This makes it difficult to want to deposit money there.

Are the reports that Forex brokers (FCM's) are required to submit to the CFTC any indication of financial health? I've talked about this in the past and the CFTC states that they are meaningful to a certain degree.  If a broker reports month over month of declining Net Capital, does it mean anything?  I don't know.  It could be meaningful or it could just be their process of accounting.  For instance, should we be concerned about Oanda's reported net capital for the last 5 months?

• July 2006 - 38 Million
  
• August 2006 - 31 Million
  
• September 2006 - 29 Million
• October 2006 - 32 Million
  
• November 2006 - 19 Million

Citi has been in the retail FX market for a couple of months now but it signals a continuing trend of big financial institutions trying to get a piece of our forex action.  Deutsche Bank was the first big bank to get in a couple of years ago (from what I remember) but it's interesting to note that all these big banks did was partner with the bigger forex firms.  They blew up the sub-prime mortgage business, will they do the same to Forex?

Here are the notable partnerships between big banks and forex specific firms: 

Deutsche Bank is partnered with FXCM.

ABN Amro and UBS are partnered with Oanda.

Citi is partnered with Saxo Bank.

Goldman is partnered with CMC Markets. 

Thanks for the comments on Oanda everyone.

Terrence says:

I recently discovered your blog and think it's excellent. You have inspired me to create my own blog that I will link to my website www.forexnetworth.com. I use the OANDA trading platform to trade and like you, I experienced serious problems with the trading platform this morning. I emailed them about the problems and they replied stating that the system did in fact experience some technical difficulties this morning prior to the GBP rate meeting. I still managed to capture 68 pips, but really missed out. I am awaiting further updates from OANDA. Apart from this morning, how have you found OANDA so far? All the best.

Terrence, I have yet to hear from Oanda regarding this morning.  I just sent them a follow up email to get some sort of explanation.  Oanda was also having disconnects during the Japanese session yesterday and into the European session.  I'm not one to complain much about brokers.  If you want to trade Forex, you accept what you get right now with hopes of future improvement for the retail trader.  Oanda has been O.K. but I really do think that the slowdown of their platform during busy times is totally unacceptable.  In addition, they really don't have features with their platform that help you in succeeding.  You take the good with the bad because no broker has had all the features I'm looking for.  If you want all the features, you use the API and write your own software.

Michael D. says:

That's troubling to hear. I use Oanda to trade GBPUSD as well. Oanda is supposed to be pretty reputable.

My guess as to what happened is that Oanda probably widened spreads and your order got filled above your take profit, making your take profit below your entry. That's just my best guess though. Good luck dealing with the issue and keep us updated on it. I'm very interested in hearing how it turns out.

Michael, I agree with you.  They probably widened the spread on the GBP/USD to 30 pips due to the BOE interest rate statement.  To be honest, I wasn't following any fundamental news and wasn't even aware of the interest rate statement coming out.  In addition, the interest rate hike was a total surprise.  Thanks.

I'll let everyone know what happened this morning when Oanda responds. 

I finally opened up an account at Oanda today and transferred funds.  Hopefully I'll be trading through this account by today or tomorrow.  I'll let everyone know how it goes.

On a side note, why must my spammers barrage my website.  I find that I'm in a constant fight to keep them from posting their forex advertising and forex promotional material here.  What a waste of time.  I'm going to start another section called FOREX SPAM SITES that explicitly list the sites that they are trying to promote.

I'm serious, I just closed out a position for a $10,000 profit.  Unfortunately it was my FXGame account at Oanda.  I had not logged into it for months and when I did login today, I noticed that I still had a short USD/JPY position open.  This trade profited 865 pips with only an 86 pip risk.  That's a 10:1 Reward/Risk Ratio.   Too bad this wasn't my real account.  If it was, this trade would never have happened.  Maybe I should start trading longer-term charts, set, and forget!