I’m not going to deposit more than a 500 at first since I’m still a beginner and in school but I’ve been learning quite a bit and want to know the best option is for a beginner broker? Oanda?
Hello @wilhelmOG,
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Pipzilla 
As a market maker I might not go with Oanda. Personally I prefer ECN brokers and use IC Markets and EagleFX but I’m from the UK. As I understand it certainly EagleFX can be used in the US but they are offshore so you’d need to weigh that up.
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Since you’re starting with $500, Oanda is the best option, because they allow you to trade unit lots (as little as 1 dollar or 1 euro) on their proprietary platform which means you can risk as little as 0.01 cents per pip. That means you would have to lose 100 pips on a trade to lose 1 cent.
On MT4, their minimum trade size is 1 micro lot which means you’re risking at least 10 cents per pip. That means if you lost 100 pips on a trade, you would lose 10 dollars which is 2% of your account.
However, you might want to risk more than 100 pips on a trade, depending on your strategy, and ideally you want to cap your risk per trade to 1% which would be 5 dollars on your account size.
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However, I have been reading about ECN brokers and it appears to be more a marketing jargon to lure people in now and what they really mean is a CFD broker. At the end of the day most brokers are market makers in some capacity now.
As @YenPounder suggests the unit lots is a nice way of limiting your losses and more easily being able to tell what a pip relates to in monetary terms.
I have used Oanda in the past they are decent .
Like the previous poster I use EagleFX mainly owing to the wide selection of Crypto pairs .
I work long hours mid week and find the weekends are my ideal time to place trades do analysis.
I run a EA also and it runs quite smoothly there .
With your budget you can afford most if not all deposits take your time and demo to get a feel of the unique platforms each have to offer .
Go for [removed for Forums violation], Turnkey Forex, FXchoice. You can go as low as $50 with them, and the trading conditions are also good. Worth recommending
Oanda? No bro. What a difficult broker they are to be with!
I am using ■■■■■■■ and octafx currently. So far so good, no major concerns. Also received deposit bonus today with ■■■■■■■ on $100
I realize this is old, but if anyone else reads this, please don’t use Oanda. I only realized they were a market maker after I used them and started researching why their spreads were so bad. On paper, the spreads are okay. But good luck trying to place a market order long or short anywhere even close to the last traded price. Every single trade I’ve made on any currency pair started out negative $20; my trades had to be perfect just to break even. Only do limit orders you say? Good luck getting them filled before the last traded price passes it 30 pips.
And yes, even when switching to their “pay commission, get tighter spreads” payment option, this still plays out the exact same way. I just trade currency futures contracts on Tradovate. Yes, their platform is a bit rough around the edges but it has great functionality and when I place a market order, I literally get my trade placed directly at the current last traded price; easily 9/10 times. If it doesn’t, it’s always 1 tick off. Limit orders tend to execute at better prices then you even ask for. It’s great. Needless to say, they are not a market maker and you can even pay a flat fee to go completely commission free (only paying clearing house fees, which are small.)
How is octafx? I have been meaning to add another broker to my portfolio and find their low minimum deposit requirement appealing.
I have actually been using this broker for a while now, trading conditions are alright. I have not experienced requotes at all, slippage is also not a problem.
Some good info in this thread:
Offshore might be your best bet with all the restrictions you face.
Thanks, seems alright to me. Balanced slippage and low latency are in fact some reasons I am using ICM and turnkeyforex. Wanted to add another broker to the list.
I have experience of using Turnkey, LDQFX and Coinexx, the minimum required to deposit with them is around 0.001 BTC. You can try with them, the brokers are also fine, all good with them so far.
I think there are many other brokers in the market which do not cost a fortune for trading. I think if you don’t have that much capital then start trading with micro/nano accounts. Though the amount is low the risk is very less. I think using scalping strategy would be best for these accounts as you can make many small trades in M1 to H1 charts with not that much high leverage. I have been using Fxview and XTB because they offer micro lots. When the funds start to pile up you can move to position trading or day trading or stick to scalping, the choice will be yours to decide.